Looking beyond our current global crises and their specifics – addendum note 3
This is my 3rd addendum posting as offered here in follow-up to a series that I have been offering here concerning our shared globally impacting climate crisis. For the series see United Nations Global Alliance for ICT and Development (UN-GAID) and its Page 2 continuation. And I offer these addendum notes in follow-up to it at the same Page 2 directory listing.
My goal for this addendum note is to offer a few thoughts regarding tipping points and the processes and events that lead to them. 2023 has now officially been declared to have been the warmest year globally that has ever been recorded, going back to when the first such globally spanning measurements were taken in 1850. I cannot claim to have been prescient, by any means when I predicted that this would happen while we were still living through that year; anyone who was following the month by month numbers for this must have seen 2023 as record breaking. It happened. And it is likely that 2024 will break that record, or at least tie it.
What leads to this type of event? A combination of gradually trending evolutionary events and particularly for their impact where they develop to a point where disruptive shift points are reached in them, and more one-off events. And in-between are periodic events that are predictable by category if not necessarily for their precise timing. In practice, and in retrospect if nothing else, the second and third of those possibilities can in fact be one and the same, where an unexpected one-off event was not actually as novel or unpredictable to occur, at least eventually, as might have initially been assumed.
Let’s take that out of the abstract with some specific examples that relates to the consequences of global warming, as well as to its direct ongoing increase. And I begin with an example that is well known in principle and that a lot of people have written about, myself included that is consequence oriented there. That is global ice sheet melting and the melting of Greenland’s ice fields in particular. This has been known to be a source of climate change risk, for a relatively long time now and with concerns of it happening and at large scale, and analyses of the possible and probably outcomes of that happening, going back decades now. It has also been found that this is already happening now. We are now starting to more fully and accurately quantify this phenomenon, and the results that are coming from that are startling. In that regard, see:
• Ubiquitous Acceleration in Greenland Ice Sheet Calving From 1985 to 2022, which I quote from with:
• “Nearly every glacier in Greenland has thinned or retreated over the past few decades, leading to glacier acceleration, increased rates of sea-level rise and climate impacts around the globe. To understand how calving-front retreat has affected the ice-mass balance of Greenland, we combine 236,328 manually derived and AI-derived observations of glacier terminus positions collected from 1985 to 2022 and generate a 120-m-resolution mask defining the ice-sheet extent every month for nearly four decades. Here we show that, since 1985, the Greenland Ice Sheet (GrIS) has lost 5,091 ± 72 km2 of area, corresponding to 1,034 ± 120 Gt of ice lost to retreat. Our results indicate that, by neglecting calving-front retreat, current consensus estimates of ice-sheet mass balance have underestimated recent mass loss from Greenland by as much as 20%. The mass loss we report has had minimal direct impact on global sea level but is sufficient to affect ocean circulation and the distribution of heat energy around the globe. On seasonal timescales, Greenland loses 193 ± 25 km2 (63 ± 6 Gt) of ice to retreat each year from a maximum extent in May to a minimum between September and October. We find that multidecadal retreat is highly correlated with the magnitude of seasonal advance and retreat of each glacier, meaning that terminus-position variability on seasonal timescales can serve as an indicator of glacier sensitivity to longer-term climate change.”
• And to stress two points made there, this means that the Greenland Ice Sheet has lost 20% more ice mass in recent decades than anyone has thought, and with that adding up to over one trillion tons of additional ice lost there.
That addresses the consequences side of global warming. What about the causal side to this, as noted above? The land that is exposed to the ambient radiant energy of sunlight as a direct result of this melting, has a much higher albedo, or coefficient of reflectivity (and adsorption) than the ice that recently covered it did. That means this now bare ground absorbs much more of that energy than covering ice would and particularly where that would be clean ice, not affected for this by covering soot or other surface contaminants (as for example, have arrived there from the massive forest fires that struck Canada in 2023.) This absorbed energy is automatically converted to heat, which can and does conduct outward to surrounding land that is still under ice, facilitating the warming and melting of that ice too and from its undersurface on up, further lubricating its flow across the land and towards the ocean.
• What I write of there can be seen as representing action and the facilitation of further action that together would lead to what would easily become a positively reinforcing feedback cycle.
Now let’s consider one-off, or at least unpredicted if not unpredictable events for how they enter into this too. El Niño and La Niña events fit this pattern, though forecasters have become better and better at predicting them and their durations and severity. But let’s set these events aside as examples for purposes of this discussion, and consider a much less known if massively impactful possibility. And that is one that comes from some very special lakes in Africa. And I begin here by focusing on Lake Kivu: the member of that group that currently appears to pose the greatest risk and both to its immediate locale and globally. See:
• This African Lake May Literally Explode—and millions are at risk, which I quote from with:
• “Lake Kivu is a geological anomaly, a multi-layered lake whose depths are saturated with trapped carbon dioxide and methane. Only two other such lakes—Lake Nyos and Lake Monoun—share these characteristics, and both have erupted in the past 50 years, spewing a lethal cloud of gas that suffocated any humans and animals in its path. When Lake Nyos erupted in 1986, it asphyxiated nearly 2,000 people and wiped out four villages in Cameroon. Folklore in the area speaks of ‘the bad lake’ and its evil spirits that emerged to kill in an instant. Concerningly, Lake Kivu is 50 times as long as Lake Nyos and more than twice as deep. Millions live on its shoreline.”
• And “ ‘Kivu has a complicated vertical structure,” Sergei Katsev, a limnologist at University of Minnesota Duluth, explains. While ‘the top [200 feet] or so mix regularly,’ the rest of the lake remains stratified. Nearly 72 cubic miles of dissolved carbon dioxide and 14 cubic miles of methane, laced with toxic hydrogen sulfide, remain trapped in the bottom of the lake. They sit beneath a ‘main density gradient’ at 850 feet below the surface. These gasses could explode above the surface. ‘When the lake reaches 100 percent saturation—and it is currently somewhere over 60 percent—it will erupt spontaneously,’ says Philip Morkel, an engineer and founder of Hydragas Energy, which is seeking funding for a project to extract methane from the lake for electricity. ‘It’s like a boiling pot of water. It looks quiet—until it starts to bubble.’ ”
To put that in perspective for its potential global impact, a complete release there could add anywhere from two to six billion tons of greenhouse gas carbon into the atmosphere in the forms of carbon dioxide and methane, and in as short a time span as a single day, where we are currently facing the release of some 38 billion tons of that from more “conventional” sources of it already, annually.
As a second reference on this, that adds further here-pertinent detail, see this report from the journal Nature:
• How dangerous is Africa’s explosive Lake Kivu?
These articles focus on the potential value of capturing and making use of the vast stores of methane that are included in this gas pocket. But to stress the obvious, these gases remain where they are and as long as they do because of the way in which the deep waters of this lake and of all lakes of its type are stratified. Mining for methane there would inevitably lead to mixing between layers in the deeper waters there and with at least some disruption of the stability in place that has held these gasses in place, and that has enabled their vast accumulations there. This could trigger the type of event that these articles warn of, leading to all of the adverse outcomes that I write of here and probably more as well.
Yes, both articles cite such risks. But both offer points of argument in favor of capitalizing on this too. And with that said, I have to add that there are not and there cannot be any good answers her for what we can do that might limit adverse impact from this. Lake Kivu already has accumulated a sufficiently large amount of these gases in its current build-up so that a sudden massive release would be catastrophic. Mining for this successfully and without any such sudden release would still mean the controlled release of vast amounts of carbon dioxide and toxic sulfur-based gases, as well as methane as its capture would not be anything like 100% efficient. Capturing and burning the methane that is successfully captured for use there would still lead to greenhouse gas releases and increases. And any such venture would create sufficient local risk of a sudden blow-out from this effort that it would not be safe for people living near that lake to remain there. This would force what would be a vast population relocation from that entire area.
But let’s reconsider the overall numbers again for the levels of greenhouse gasses cited there. If annual anthropogenic release of such gasses into the atmosphere total some 38 billion tons and if a complete release of such pollutants from an eruption of them from Lake Kivu when it is at 100% capacity for them would add 6 billion additional tons of that to the overall environmental load faced, then a perhaps forced eruption at 60% of that maximum load would add some 3.6 billion additional tons of these pollutants onto an already overburdened system, with that leading to a sudden increase there of almost 9.5% over the “normal” load there. If the background carbon footprint load was a lot smaller, that would buffer the environment from the level of impact that this absolute level of increase would have, when compared to adding it to an already significantly distressed system.
• As matter stand now, a greenhouse gas eruption of the type that could happen now from this lake, would have much greater deleterious impact globally, than that same eruption would have had in an 1850 context.
All of the issues and complications that I write of here in this posting directly address how tipping point events can become more likely, and how they can take place and as seemingly sudden developments.
I am going to continue adding addendum note additions to my global environmental crisis series as developments warrant that. Meanwhile, you can find this and related material at Macroeconomics and Business and its Page 2, Page 3, Page 4 and Page 5 continuations. And you can also find this and related material at my directory: United Nations Global Alliance for ICT and Development (UN-GAID) and its Page 2 continuation.
Addendum note:
To put 2023 in perspective for its average annualized global temperature, I only cited our historical records in this posting when noting that this was the warmest year on record going back to 1850 when the first relatively complete and reliable records were kept on this. That is misleading. It is believed that 2023 was the warmest year that Earth has faced in at least 125,000 years as that can be ascertained from a variety of geological sources such as deep ice core analyses from long-term persistent polar ice fields. This is important to keep in mind as we consider where we are now and where we are headed as far as global warming and our response to it are concerned.
The challenge of knowing what to focus on and plan around, and either strategically or tactically 54
This posting is the 54th installment in a series that is grounded on the issues of better developing and organizing planning in a business, and at both a more here-and-now tactical level and at a more wide-ranging and long-term strategic level. And I have made use of that first part of this series as so stated, as a compendium model-organized starting point, for discussing general theories of business and of economics per se. See the first 55 supplemental postings that I added to the end of Section IX of Reexamining the Fundamentals 2 for Parts 1-53 of this series, as well as links to two earlier postings that it builds from for all that I have offered up to now in this. And that developing narrative has led me to a basic question that I am currently addressing:
• How can a general theory of business and of economics be developed and in ways that can be widely accepted, that would fit as closely as possible to an open body of theory paradigm?
Ongoing discussion of that and its issues has led me to this subtopic point:
2. What if a phenomenological property that has been characterized as being describable as a single factor: a single recognized variable has been misunderstood and inadequately analyzed as a result? This becomes an issue where such an in-fact assembly of in-principle separable factors contains greater structural and functional complexity than has been understood for it, so the wrong supposedly there-fundamental variables have been analyzed and in the wrong way.
To round out this initial orienting note, I have most recently been discussing the issues and possibilities that come from how this follow-up question to that might best be answered:
• How would we best arrive at and construct a simple systems approach for descriptively and predictably thinking about business and economic systems that would be counterpart to the ideal gas laws for what they descriptively and predictively model and for how they can be elaborated upon in the development of more inclusive bodies of theory?
I have focused on the open body of theory side of that, leaving parallel discussion of its semi-open counterparts for follow-up discussion that I will build from this. And I focused in an open body of theory context as note here, in Part 53, on a physical systems example that I have been exploring for its wider illustrative value: the ideal gas laws and complicating variations of them that emerging empirical evidence has led to. My goal for this posting is to offer and at least briefly discuss a business and economics counterpart to that physical systems example. And as I noted in Part 52, that represents a point in this discussion where I will further consider both the atomos and the axiomatic sides of general bodies of theory.
I begin discussing all of this with a posited counterpart to the ideal gas laws, as can be found in competitive market-facing businesses and the markets they compete for shares of sales and profits in. And the example that I would pursue here is the much praised and equally much vilified invisible hand of the marketplace conceptualization of Adam Smith.
To start this, let’s operationalize that precept in rules based terms:
• Markets and their consumer members demand and purchase product offerings that meet their needs, desires and preferences and at lowest cost to themselves while still meeting their product quality standards.
• The demand side of this creates financial incentive for manufacturing businesses and the retailers that they supply, to offer those products.
• But the total sales opportunity that any such products or product types might be able to realize is always going to be limited by the financial resource limits of, and the purchasing prioritizations and pricing demands of those marketplace buyers.
• These limitations place pressure on product providers to limit what they would charge for what they offer with that leading to openly competitive pricing.
• When there is a low enough level of overall competition for the sale of a product type that is in demand in a marketplace and where alternatives to it are competitively possible, this incentivizes new competitors to move into that market opportunity and certainly if they can offer the same or better for less to the customer and still make a reasonable profit from that, making this feasible for them.
• The overall consequence of this dynamic would be that businesses compete for sales shares but in market contexts that would constrain and limit their pricing and their profitability to what the market with its demands will bear.
Think of this as a counterpart to the ideal gas laws, and as a conceptual approach that can offer direct value under a wide range of normative circumstances – just as the ideal gas laws do. But just as is the case for those physical systems laws, this conceptual model faces circumstances that glaringly violate it. And it is a lot easier to unambiguously understand, characterize and quantify such exceptions where a baseline simply model is in place that can be used for comparative purposes – at least in principle.
In this case and as one source of challenge to this model that would call for its elaboration, deviations from the Adam Smith simple market model come from the systematic impact of outside forces that this model does not account for or address. And I turn to the examples of prescription drugs and their market prices as a source of confounding examples here, that I offer as counterpart to the inversion temperature phenomena of ideal gas law violations as already discussed here in this series.
• The Adam Smith model presumes that producing and providing businesses compete on a level playing field and that none of the competitors there starting out with biasing advantages. But this is not true for pharmaceuticals and for a variety of reasons, and with patent protection for new(er) brand name drugs only serving as part of that.
• Customers have to have real voices in demanding competitive prices where alternative options (e.g. brand name and generic) are available. But large areas of this marketplace are built in ways that limit this. Most people, and I pursue a United States drug sales model here by way of example, purchase prescription medications through insurance policies. But these organizations face pressures and limitations to how much they can demand lower, more competitive pricing. Medicare and Medicaid: the two national government based healthcare plans are even blocked by law as I write this, from being able to negotiate drug prices for what they cover, and for what their enrolled members will have to pay out of pocket for their shares of these costs.
• The same drugs that are sold at inflated prices in the United States, are sold in other countries and for less and even much less – and even when batches of them sold in those countries are manufactured in the same facilities, by the same people, using the same raw materials and with them produced with the same equipment. But it is only now as I write this, that it looks like Americans will be allowed to legally purchase such drugs from Canada, as a case in point alternative source, with its lower prices. Intensive ongoing lobbying from the pharmaceutical industry in the United States has kept such purchasing illegal for all Americans.
How can the impact of this and other perturbations from what would be expected in a free and open market be quantified? That would require data that essentially all pharmaceutical manufacturers maintain as inviolably secret and proprietary business intelligence. But where such information does leak into public visibility, its actual costs to manufacture and related data can be applied to simply model systems that would lead to cost range calculations that consumers would face there, if the prescription drug market was free and open, as per the Adam Smith model. Such analyses help to shed light on the complicating and skewing factors here.
And with this, I have raised a series of understanding-confounding and complicating issues that can enter into shaping semi-open bodies of theory, and with unaddressed but impactful outcomes-shaping factors, data availability issues and more entering into this.
I am going to reframe this developing narrative in the next installment to this series in terms of semi-open bodies of theory. That, I add, represents a point in this discussion where I will further consider both the atomos and the axiomatic sides of general bodies of theory and I will discuss both open and semi-open possibilities in those terms. And bringing that complex of issues more fully into this line of discussion will all but compel my further addressing the issues of agreement and of acceptance here as well.
As a final thought here, Adam Smith’s invisible hand of the marketplace has been honored and respected to the extent that it has because it clearly articulates the basic working principles that would drive the economics of an ideal marketplace – of a marketplace as we would like such forums to be for their openness and certainly where businesses can and do compete for sales with good, competitive products at good, competitive prices. That same approach is reviled and dismissed because simple and ideal rarely apply and certainly as a primary realized pattern in the real world – and certainly in real marketplaces, barring countervailing factors that would compensate for the types of systematic outcomes skewing such as the ones that I write of here. I will address the implications of this in upcoming discussion of semi-open bodies of theory too.
Meanwhile, you can find this and related material at my Reexamining the Fundamentals directory and its Page 2 continuation, as topics Sections VI and IX there, and with this posting and its series specifically included as supplemental additions to Section IX there.
Aligning human innovation and technological advancement with larger environmental needs 6
I have been addressing climate change and other global challenges in a succession of interrelated series in this blog, and I offer this one as a continuation to that narrative progression. My goal here is to discuss possible technology based approaches to affecting positive change here, their possible implementations, and their providers. See United Nations Global Alliance for ICT and Development (UN-GAID) 2 for Parts 1-5 of this series.
I focused in Part 1 and Part 2 on two of the most significant sources of environmental challenge that we collectively face: our seemingly ever-expanding carbon footprint as it drives global warming, and our equally expanding problem of global pollution from plastic in its many forms. And I ended Part 2 by offering these to-address topic points:
1. I am going to at least categorically discuss approaches that might be considered and attempted in remediating such challenges, and ones that are already being deployed to address them.
2. That is where detailed understandings of the issues faced and of how they might best be acted upon have to be addressed. That is where broad generalities as favored by policy makers in summits and related forums, and in their within-nation planning have to meet with and constructively respond to our day-to-day realities and actionably so. And that is where complex and even seemingly contradictory details that arise and that absolutely have to be addressed in all of this are emerging, and unavoidably so.
3. Actually addressing those challenges will call for our more fully acknowledging, understanding and actively responding to them and even in the face of our having to challenge our own short-term interests – and certainly if we are to effectively and sustainably address them so as to achieve long-term benefit.
4. But at least as importantly, this effort has to include active consideration of possible side effects and collateral changes that developing and deploying possible remediation tools might bring – where some of them as proposed could be as bad as or even worse than the initial problems that they are intended to help solve.
5. Then moving further forward and to put this overall line of discussion into context here, I will discuss the Who and How of providing, selecting and using, and performance reviewing these tools and their technologies here.
6. And I will discuss trade-offs in all of this too.
To bring this initial orienting note up to date, I have been discussing both of the categorically stated sources of challenge that I address in Parts 1 and 2 of this series from the perspective of the first two of the topics points that I am pursuing here. And that has led me, as I said at the end of Part 5 with the following, for what I will begin to discuss in this series installment:
• I am going to list and discuss approaches to limiting carbon pollution production, and carbon sequestration and more, starting in the next installment to this series, as well as briefly returning to and reconsidering some of the more specific possible remediations that I made note of in my series: Looking Beyond Our Current Global Crises and Their Specifics, (which can be found at my United Nations Global Alliance for ICT and Development (UN-GAID) directory.)
I begin addressing that complex of issues by taking a high level, broadly stated approach to what can be and what has to be done there, mirroring what I offered in Part 4 in a plastic pollution context. And I begin that by posing an at-least conceptually simple and straight forward question. What are the main building block pieces that could go into developing an overall, effective, sustainable remediation of our carbon footprint problem, and one with both local and national, and global reach? And I respond to that with this four point list:
• Reducing carbon footprint gas emissions and even zeroing them out to what ideally would be pre-industrial levels.
• Capturing carbon footprint chemicals already out in our global environment and causing harm, and turning them to productive and environmentally safe use, or
• Stabilizing them chemically so they cease to pose harm or risk, or
• Sequestering them in ways that would remove them from the active environment and long-term.
I begin addressing that list and its puzzle pieces to remediation here with the first of them. And I do so by noting that different pollution reduction approaches are needed there, depending on precisely how and where those greenhouse gasses are being produced. So any first step in addressing that point has to be grounded in a deep and detailed understanding of the How and Where of this and with prioritization placed on addressing the most serious, pollution creating sources. What are they now, as I write this, and what are their relative levels of contribution to this overall problem? Turning to this US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) study: Sources of Greenhouse Gas Emissions, the top five for that are:
• Electrical power production with that accounting for 30% of anthropogenic greenhouse gas releases,
• Transportation with that primarily coming from our use of internal combustion engines, at 26% of such pollution releases,
• Industry, as a complex and multi-facetted problem for this, at 21%,
• Commercial and residential sources and with much of that coming from heating and air conditioning, at 12%, and
• Agriculture at 9%.
This partitions out sources of carbon footprint gasses at the level of industry sectors, to use that term in a more general sense (as is done in that report.) And that makes this report and its findings a first step analysis of the How and Where of this, and just that.
Let’s start with electrical power generation, and with two of its major culprits here: coal and petrochemical burning as an initial source of energy there, that would be converted to electrical power. Two generally stated possibilities come immediately to mind there:
• Replacement of old hydrocarbon fuel burning power plants that require such resources to work, with green energy alternatives such as wind and solar power, and geothermal energy generation.
• And transitional approaches such as efforts to reduce the amount of coal that is required in order to produce a given number of kilowatts of power, in what is still basically a more conventional power plant, but one refitted to burn a combination of (low sulfur and therefore less polluting) coal and ammonia.
Focusing on the first of those possibilities, what are the timeframes that would be needed for switching over to green there? That would depend on where this is going to be done, where direct monetary costs can only be considered to represent one factor there. To start, it has to be realistically possible to build and operate green technology alternatives and at sufficient scale to replace existing systems, for any of these approaches or any like them to succeed. Geothermal can and does work and very effectively in places such as Iceland, but it cannot be deployed and used where subsurface geothermal energy sources are not available and with that including virtually all long-term geologically stable areas that lack nearby volcanism, plate subduction zones or the like. Solar power generation cannot succeed in areas that do not have adequate year-around solar energy to rely upon for powering that. And wind power cannot work and reliably so if there are no reliable winds to work with.
I will address the issues of buy-in and related challenges when I reach the above repeated Point 5 in this overall discussion, simply noting that finding potentially viable approaches here from a technological and engineering perspective is only part of what has to be resolved here. And I will complete this line of discussion at least for here in this posting by making note of the obvious. Effective remediation here, at this step in this overall problem with reduction in carbon footprint pollution production has to be site and context specific and both in addressing the facilities and types of them that pollute here, and where and how they are located. And that brings in a lot more than just contextual technological and engineering issues.
Note: I raised the possibility of adding ammonia into coal as a means of reducing adverse climate impact in Part 119 of the series that this posting is appended to, where I cited and referenced an initiative under development in Japan to do precisely that. The important point that I raised there, as a cautionary note for this approach, was that any such remediation step should only be considered or used as a stepping-stone, interim measure if the goal for its deployment is to achieve longer-term benefit. When solutions like it are deployed as long-term fixes, they become part of the problem, rather than part of the solution.
That point offered and both for clarification and to provide references to that part of this discussion, I am going to turn to and address the issues of capturing, stabilizing and sequestering carbon pollution in the next installment in this series, continuing my focus on electrical power generation as a major categorical source of carbon footprint gases as I do so. And I will discuss lifecycle issues in this developing context, and with all four of the categorically stated carbon footprint remediation possibilities that I listed above, addressed in that: reducing carbon based pollution itself, included.
Then, looking ahead beyond that, I will at least briefly discuss the remaining four major polluting categories as cited in the above US EPA report, as I complete this overall line of discussion within this series’ narrative.
Meanwhile, you can find this series at United Nations Global Alliance for ICT and Development (UN-GAID) 2 and at Ubiquitous computing and communications – everywhere all the time 4. And you can find related material at my Macroeconomics and Business directory pages.
Rethinking exit and entrance strategies 60: keeping an effective innovative focus while approaching and going through significant business transitions 50
This is my 60th installment to a series that offers a general discussion of business transitions, where an organization exits one developmental stage or period of relative strategic and operational stability, to enter a fundamentally different next one (see Business Strategy and Operations – 3 and its Page 4, Page 5, Page 6 and Page 7 continuations, postings 559 and loosely following for Parts 1-59.)
I have been discussing change: gradual and evolutionary, and disruptively revolutionary and reorienting in this series, and how they both enter into and inform business change as a whole where true transformative business transitions might be needed. And I have been pursuing this overall narrative to a significant degree in terms of a specific if contextually changing and evolving case study framework that I have been identifying as ClarkBuilt Inc.
I began this narrative with this business facing need for entering into fundamental change, where it had been and still fundamentally was a cutting edge technology and product offering business – but where cracks were beginning to appear in their basic business model for how those fundamentals were changing. They entered into and went through a transitional change in which they continued to manufacture for themselves and with a cutting edge focus, but where they also started to offer design services for other manufacturers, trading on their name brand and reputation and their known strength in depth for this. But ClarkBuilt and its context have changed since then and both for its marketplace and for its competition for the contextual side of that. And one of the consequences of that is that ClarkBuilt is not actually as cutting edge as it once was, and as it has continued to think of itself as being. They have reached a point in their development where they need to change again and from their fundamentals on out: from how their owners and managers, and their staff in general see and understand this business and for what they do. And that has led to a restatement of the basic bullet pointed description of this business as I offered in draft form at the end of Part 59:
• ClarkBuilt Inc.: a business that has reached a point in its development, as previously discussed here, where its owning founders have to make some fundamental decisions as to what type of business they have now, and what type they will have moving forward: as a manufacturer of more mainstreamed products and just that, or as a newly reinvigorated producer of more cutting edge products again,
• That still maintains a design shop side of their business, but one that explicitly caters to the needs of client businesses that fit along a wider range of an innovation acceptance diffusion curve for who their own clients are now.
That, I stress here, was only offered as a draft version possibility. And it was with this point of understanding in mind that I concluded Part 59 with this to-address note:
• The real decision making of this draft rewrite as such, is probably going to be in the framing of its first half, where impactful change-demanding decisions are demonstrably needed. I am going to continue this line of discussion in the next installment to this series where I will reconsider that rewrite as I continue this case study.
And I begin addressing that by highlighting and addressing the single most important and contentious text that is included in that rewrite as a whole: “as a manufacturer of more mainstreamed products and just that, or as a newly reinvigorated producer of more cutting edge products again.”
I did not rewrite the basic description of this business in settled and agreed-to terms. I draft rewrote it as a description of disagreement and even outright rancor, discussion and withdrawal from that and return to it, negotiations, and hopefully with more unifying agreement to come.
• What does cutting edge mean now in their industry and business sector and for the marketplace and its customer members who demand that?
• What would it take to return to being a cutting edge manufacturer there? This, obviously, would require that they develop at least one dramatically new offering and even type of new offering that could be developed into a product line, that would bring them back into that game. But assuming they have a real possibility there and at least one new such product, what would they need to be able to do to actually develop it into a marketable offering that they could offer at an effective price point for that market, and at sufficient volume so as to meet consumer needs, and with good quality control and other due diligence considerations actively in place?
• Could they finance this on their own and from their own reserves and other resources or would they have to reach out for additional funding? And if so how? And if so, what strings might be attached to they’re receiving such support?
• Or should they simply transition into being a more mainstreamed product designer and producer and capitalize on the fact that the overall market for such products is and always will be much larger, than can be possible for cutting edge New?
• Or as a third possibility should they in fact pursue both approaches, expanding their production line capabilities from profits from their already more mainstreamed products to fund their riskier but potentially more profitable per-unit sold cutting edge ventures?
• And in all three of these possible scenarios, their design shop would provide an added measure of fiscal security to the business from its revenue flows with their income generation and profits.
I wrote above in this posting of the discussions and negotiations to come as the possibilities of the above draft rewrite are debated and decided upon, and with this description of that process as it might be faced:
• Disagreement and even outright rancor, discussion and withdrawal from that and return to it, negotiations, and hopefully more unifying agreement to come.
And I intentionally phrased that as starting with what could be harsh disagreement at least to start as “traditionalists” in these discussions would seek to keep to the original cutting edge vision of their business, and as “realists” would demand that ClarkBuilt simply move on from that. Then I offered my bullet pointed three scenarios list of possibilities with a goal of making them all look possible (even if challenging) and with a hybrid approach – once again, a reasonable option. The most important point of detail that I could cite there, is that I sought to frame the possibilities in that list in ways that would not leave any of the approaches espoused by any of the competing parties in this debate, presented as if they would push this business over the edge of a cliff.
My goal in that was to frame those possibilities in terms that are as non-confrontational as possible, so as to limit any initial rancor and facilitate productive conversation and negotiations as needed, and from as early on in this process as possible – and with a goal of that increasing the chances of best possible resolutions being achieved and sustainably so. I am going to continue this line of discussion from there, in the next installment to this series. Meanwhile, you can find this and related postings and series at Business Strategy and Operations – 7, and also at Page 1, Page 2, Page 3, Page 4, Page 5 and Page 6 of that directory.
Telecommuting reconsidered as a new normal 52
This is my 52nd posting to a series that has its roots in this blog going back to its beginning, and certainly in my thinking. More concretely and as a matter of written record, this has its roots here, going back at least as far as late 2012 when I thought through and then wrote and posted a short series on a possible business model that would take online and remote working to its logical conclusion, with the possibilities of an essentially entirely online and remote workplace business: a true telecompany. See Outsourcing and Globalization, postings 48 and following for my series: Telecommuting and the Marketplace Transition to the Telecompany. And you can find this series at that same directory page starting with its posting 70.
I have been successively discussing each of a set of three topics points in this series:
1. How would the strategic, tactical and operational decisions that would go into addressing these types of change affect the business, and both going into and coming out of such a transition?
2. How would disruptions and potential disruptions be managed while this type of transition is actually being carried out?
3. And equally importantly, what does this mean from the perspective of the human impact of all of this, that the hands-on and managerial employees at a business would face when and as these changes are planned and carried out?
And to bring this initial orienting note up to date, I began explicitly discussing Point 3 of that list in Part 51, where I focused on the importance of the hands-on employees and managers in this, for how their participation in the businesses that they work for make the before, during and after of any business transition possible.
Point 3 and the issues that I raised in Part 51 can be understood and approached from two directions: that of the employing business and that of those employees themselves. My goal for this posting is to continue to address the business perspective side of this as started there and with a goal of coordinately discussing both sides to that in this series. That noted, I continue this line of discussion here, with obvious:
• It is the people who actually carry out the tasks and work flows of them that make that business function and succeed, and who have to be able to enact the changes that enter into any business transition there to make it succeed too. They have to be able to effectively and smoothly transition into carrying out any New that arises from this at day-to-day and longer timeframe operational and tactical levels. They have to be able to make these switchovers succeed and as smoothly and non-disruptively as possible as that business seeks to continue to meet the needs of its customers and its marketplace – and those of any business-to-business supply chain and other partners. And they need to be provided with the resources required for all of this, and realistic opportunity to make effective use of those resources too.
The capacity and the flexibility needed for actually achieving all of this has to be built into the transition plans that are developed, with the How and the By Whom of that mapping in functional detail into the What of it and with that mapped out in actionable detail. I write here of operationalizing due diligence and risk management at the hands-on and managerial levels where such processes actually take place when they are carried through upon. And I add that this all has to be feedback and response driven. That means fully involving staff and its members as essential stakeholders in planning and carrying out a transition here, and that means actively communicating with them and in all directions: top-down, bottom-up and laterally as that becomes necessary too. And the more disruptive a possible emergent challenge is in this overall process, the more important lateral communications are likely to be there as unexpected issues are clarified and as solutions to them that can work across affected parts of the business are proposed, implemented and results-verified.
What I am outlining here is a basic and even generic game plan for moving forward and with course corrections in that as needed. Actually planning and executing on anything like this is going to have to be grounded in the specific details of the business carrying this out, its history and its staff, its business sector and its market and business-to-business contexts and more. I am going to turn in the next installment to this series to address the issues raised here again and at this same conceptual level as in this posting, but from the employee and manager perspective. Then and with both of these lines of discussion in place, I am going to begin fleshing out this overall approach from a more business-individualized perspective.
Meanwhile, you can find this and related postings and series at Outsourcing and Globalization.
Aligning human innovation and technological advancement with larger environmental needs 5
I have been addressing climate change and other global challenges in a succession of interrelated series in this blog, and I offer this one as a continuation to that narrative progression. My goal here is to discuss possible technology based approaches to affecting positive change here, their possible implementations, and their providers. See United Nations Global Alliance for ICT and Development (UN-GAID) 2 for Parts 1-4 of this series.
I focused in Part 1 and Part 2 on two of the most significant sources of environmental challenge that we collectively face: our seemingly ever-expanding carbon footprint as it drives global warming, and our equally expanding problem of global pollution from plastic in its many forms. And I ended Part 2 by offering these to-address topic points:
1. I am going to at least categorically discuss approaches that might be considered and attempted in remediating such challenges, and ones that are already being deployed to address them.
2. That is where detailed understandings of the issues faced and of how they might best be acted upon have to be addressed. That is where broad generalities as favored by policy makers in summits and related forums, and in their within-nation planning have to meet with and constructively respond to our day-to-day realities and actionably so. And that is where complex and even seemingly contradictory details that arise and that absolutely have to be addressed in all of this are emerging, and unavoidably so.
3. Actually addressing those challenges will call for our more fully acknowledging, understanding and actively responding to them and even in the face of our having to challenge our own short-term interests – and certainly if we are to effectively and sustainably address them so as to achieve long-term benefit.
4. But at least as importantly, this effort has to include active consideration of possible side effects and collateral changes that developing and deploying possible remediation tools might bring – where some of them as proposed could be as bad as or even worse than the initial problems that they are intended to help solve.
5. Then moving further forward and to put this overall line of discussion into context here, I will discuss the Who and How of providing, selecting and using, and performance reviewing these tools and their technologies here.
6. And I will discuss trade-offs in all of this too.
To bring this initial orienting note up to date, I have been addressing issues raised by both of the categorically stated sources of environmental challenge and harm that I focus upon here. And I have been alternating between them, and doing so in terms of both topics Point 1 and 2 as offered in my above list of them. I focused on global pollution from plastic in Part 4, offering briefly stated responses to both Point 1 and 2 there in that context. And my primary goal for this posting is to begin to build from my carbon footprint and global warming discussion of Part 3 with its Point 2 focus, to consider that complex of issues from a Point 1 perspective.
But that said, I also intend to at least briefly add to my Part 4 discussion of plastic pollution and its possible remediation here, with a very real-world cautionary note example of how the law of unexpected consequences can show itself – and in this case where consequences should have been quite predictable.
Plastic pollution is ugly, with discarded essentially non-degradable accumulations of it serving as eyesores. And photos of seemingly endlessly expansive accumulations of it floating at sea and in other venues that might be physically distant from us are equally disturbing and to many. So entrepreneurs and innovators began looking for ways to make that disappear and at least for new additions to all of this. And one solution that was proposed that has in fact taken off in use, is the development of disposable single use plastic bags and other functionally ephemeral containers that are manufactured from combinations of plastic and starches and similar readily biodegradable substances.
I have seen laudatory videos taken with time-lapse photography that show bags manufactured this way seemingly melting into the ground and disappearing. The bags themselves do, but what of the plastic components of these products? They persist and when you consider this from their perspective, this technological fix can realistically be seen as a means of accelerating the production of micro- and nanoparticle plastics, where they are the most toxic and directly environmentally harmful forms of these materials (as briefly discussed and with references in Part 2.)
• This is crucially important and on a variety of levels. First of all, cosmetic fixes – and that is what these “biodegradable” bags are, do not and cannot solve the underlying problems that they seek to address. They simply mask them and move them out of immediate, direct sight. They do not make them or their real underlying challenges go away.
• We can only effectively address the environmental challenges that we in fact face, if we face and address the underlying facts of them and in actionable detail and in ways that actively resolve them. In this plastics “remediation” example, that means actually addressing the issues of the plastic in those bags too.
The basic issues and challenges that I raise here in a plastics context apply just as fully to global warming and to every other challenge that we face. My primary goal in this posting is to at least begin to address environmental remediation possibilities for addressing global warming, from a Point 1, How-oriented perspective. I begin doing so here by posing some fundamental questions that need to be asked and responded to when considering any possible remediation there too:
• Is this (fill in the blank) proposed solution more cosmetic and appearance-level in nature and for its possibilities? (And if so, how?)
• Or is it designed to address and remediate the actual underlying causes in place that are leading to the symptomatic challenges that we would seek to address with it? (And if so, how?)
I am going to list and discuss approaches to limiting carbon pollution production, and carbon sequestration and more in the next installment to this series, as well as briefly returning to and reconsidering some of the more specific possible remediations that I made note of in my series: Looking Beyond Our Current Global Crises and Their Specifics, (which can be found at my United Nations Global Alliance for ICT and Development (UN-GAID) directory.) And looking further ahead, I will turn to and discuss Points 3 and following from my above-repeated topics list after completing this Points 1 and 2 line of discussion through at-least an initial relatively complete iteration.
Meanwhile, you can find this series at United Nations Global Alliance for ICT and Development (UN-GAID) 2 and at Ubiquitous computing and communications – everywhere all the time 4. And you can find related material at my Macroeconomics and Business directory pages.
Management and strategy by prototype – 23: bringing this into a business process context 20
This is the 23rd installment to a series that I began writing and offering here, early in this blog. And it is one that I have returned to more recently, to more fully develop. See Business Strategy and Operations, postings 124 and 126 for Parts 1 and 2, and Business Strategy and Operations – 5 and its Page 6 and Page 7 continuations, posting 938 and loosely following for Parts 3-22.
I have been discussing a set of more abstractly stated issues in recent installments to this series, that organize around a set of three topics points:
• The first two of them dealt with the positive role that improving overall information management systems per se can have on addressing wide ranging business problems,
• And data collection and entry uncertainties as they can arise in practice.
• And the third of them addresses scope creep and scalability as those issues arise in the light of this developing narrative.
To bring this initial orienting note up to date here, I am currently discussing the third of those points after offering at-least first cut responses to the first two of them. I have posed three real-world scenarios in which scope creep challenges can and do arise and significantly so:
• When managers, and senior managers in particular, require that more be done, (as for example when promoting their own pet projects,)
• When people responsible for reaching their assigned work performance goals see themselves as having to take extra steps and carry our more preliminary, necessary additional work in order to reach them (or use unofficial work-arounds for that,) and
• When people simply continue to carry out tasks just because they have seemingly always done them there, and even when they are no longer called for (and even, I add here, when their being carried out competes for limited resources that are more legitimately needed elsewhere.)
I addressed the first of these possibilities in Part 22 and concluded that with a goal of similarly addressing the second of them here. More specifically, I focused on the problem side of the first scenario in Part 22, I will take a similarly focused approach to addressing the second of them here, and I will discuss the third of them from that more limited perspective next. And then I will discuss remediation approaches as they would apply in all of these contexts and with that including my reconsidering prototyping as one of a set of available tools for that.
To begin addressing the above-repeated second scenario, I pose a question that I would always address it in terms of, and certainly as I begin an assignment where it is taking place. Why is this happening?
Note that I did not start out asking how or where it is happening though any real understanding of the Why of this has to be grounded in at least a measure of How and Where detail. And I certainly did not start out asking anything about the specifics of what additional work is being done by whom, and at the expense of that limiting possible effort in completing which particular more directly assigned tasks and on time and within budget. In the real world, this is a problematical scenario type where the answers to those questions will only emerge in real and significant detail as this overall challenge is being unraveled, and most likely as at-least preliminary efforts are being made to address it – starting with the most overt examples of it taking place that led to an attempt at remediation there in the first place, and with that effort continuing on to include less obvious manifestations of it too. Scenario two is a voyage of discovery, wherever it has developed and to a degree that would compel corrective response to it – and with that often only happening when discretionary funds and related resources have been cumulatively lost to this overall inefficiency and when it is beginning to impact upon the business’ bottom line.
That noted, why is this happening? What is there in this business, or in a more specific area of it that would enable or even encourage this type of scenario from developing, and as even as business as usual there? That last sentence clause is very important; the issues raised here become matters of business-wide concern when they collectively become a de facto work standard and not just a matter of individual employee disorganization and inefficiency.
When this is systematic and it is also more localized within a business rather than affecting the entire enterprise, that can mean it developing as an ongoing issue along a specific line on the table of organization as a whole, or within some functional box in such a line, in a satellite office or other distinctly and separately geographically located facility, or in any of a variety of other specific contexts. But in any such case this means it developing and taking hold in an area of that business that is strategically and tactically isolated and to a consequentially significant degree from the business as a whole, and with insufficient corrective oversight and review in place to stop let alone prevent this there.
• Why have this problem and its manifestations, and its inevitable work-arounds become standard practice there?
• What drives and even sustains that?
• And then, what are the specific details as to how this is taking place where the deeper you dig, the more you will find and certainly where this has become a business practice standard.
I am going to offer some thoughts in response to those questions and their accompanying comment when I address the remediation side of the three challenge scenarios under discussion here as a group. I will simply add in anticipation of that, that the most reasonable and the most actionable starting point for addressing this second scenario can usually be found in whichever specific instances of it have risen to such a high enough level of visibility and impact so as to have drawn attention to this problem as a whole. And starting there has to include looking further enough out from that point of entry to this to verify that this is not just a problem with one or a few specific employees and that their problems in working efficiently and on their tasks are not just isolated issues that can be addressed as such.
And with that I am going to turn to the third scenario as offered above, in the next installment to this series, addressing it there as noted above. Meanwhile, you can find this and related postings and series at Business Strategy and Operations – 7, and also at Page 1, Page 2, Page 3, Page 4, Page 5 and Page 6 of that directory.
Balancing unique value and new, with ease of use and consumer familiarity – 8
This is the 8th installment to a series on making new and even disruptively new products and product types more consumer-friendly and familiarly so, while offering unique new value and utility with all of the change that this brings with it. As such, this series focuses on finding what would ideally be an optimized balance point between new and novel, and the already known and familiar. See Parts 1-7 as can be found at Ubiquitous Computing and Communications – everywhere all the time 4.
My goal for this series is to at least relatively systematically address that complex set of issues by successively addressing each of a set of eight more subordinate topics points. I have offered at least initial responses to the first six of them up to here and my goal for this posting is to offer a corresponding response to the seventh of them (noting that you can find the complete list of them at Part 3.)
That noted I turn to:
7. Positive and negative value creating change – and the issues of who would see change from one or the other side of that dichotomous perspective.
I initially phrased that topic point in the context of the dichotomy that I indicate in the first opening paragraph to each of the installments to this series, with its new and different versus familiar and easily mastered and used issues. But I have also, and starting with my first case study example in this series, been addressing that point in terms of what can be a manufacturer versus end user and purchasing customer dichotomy too, where such categorically distinct stakeholders in this can differ as to what an ideal product should be able to do and how, and functionally and in day-to-day practical use.
In a real sense, I have been discussing this set of issues from the beginning of this series and I have continued doing so throughout it. So my goal for this posting is to bring at least some of its major issues as already touched upon, together in a more organized and focused manner. And I begin doing so by noting that my posing the dichotomy of Point 7 as taking two forms, as I did in the immediately preceding paragraph is misleading at best and false in most any practical sense. Usability and ease of learning new features and ways of using them with minimal learning curve requirements should always be a defining goal for the developers and manufacturers of New. If the people who would purchase and use their product offerings are turned off by them at the last buy-in step of usability itself, their products can only be considered to be failures. Products that are never used, that get lost in the clutter of peoples’ closets if they are purchased at all, and products that simply cannot succeed for lacking necessary features become one and the same in practice. The inevitable viral marketing messages of online social media can only be expected to drive the last nails into the coffins of all such products.
Products that work and easily and effectively so, and that meet the primary needs of the people who buy and use them will end up being used and consistently so, and even if they do not have all that many additional add-on features that a manufacture might want to include but that are not of significant user-priority in and of themselves. Ultimately, the two dichotomy perspectives that I suggested here represent two faces of a same source of fundamental, essential decision points that designers and manufacturers have to address as they build for New while (hopefully) making just as much effort not to leave their customer base behind from that.
• At least in principle, marketing intelligence would offer insight there, that can be used to close any gaps in understanding between designers and manufacturers, and buying customers and end users in this. But the more novel and New an innovative product offering is, the less reliable marketing data there can be for evaluating marketplace and individual consumer judgment or response to it. So market data analysis of similar and even analogous examples with their consumer responses becomes essential there.
• And crucially importantly, while more novel and cutting edge products might primarily appeal to more pioneer and early adaptor audiences, there are always going to be exceptions to that and particularly for products that do not require significant learning curves to master, if any, and that meet widely held but until-now unaddressed needs.
• Such needs exist and such products can and do too. Effectively meshing new and even fundamentally New with usability can widen the initial market appeal of, and even the demand for such innovative offerings.
• Let’s reconsider the automobile dashboard example that I began this series with. The manufacturer of those cars saw exclusivity and exclusion from ownership, and from what amounted to buyer membership there, as a defining virtue. That was not necessarily a lethally flawed decision for big ticket priced high end luxury automobiles. But it would be for any product type that was at least intended to draw in a larger, wider market and at least eventually.
And with that, I offer the above repeated Point 7 as a challenge and as one in which winners and losers would be chosen by the marketplace and with their dollars and other currency. And yes, I offer this as a context where Adam Smith’s invisible hand of the marketplace really does exist. Only it is not actually all that invisible as its impact shows and very directly and overtly so in sales numbers, and in the cash flows that lead to and that come from them as investments and returns.
I am going to turn to the final, eighth topic point of my Part 3 list in the next installment to this series:
8. And of course user resistance and buy-in here.
And my goal there will be to both address and to challenge the strictly consumer-centric view of these issues that I have been presenting here, adding some real-world complexities to the approach that I have been developing in this narrative. And in anticipation of that discussion to come, it will include more detailed consideration of choice and of expectations as they enter this narrative, and as they arise and play out from the perspectives of differing stakeholders in this.
Meanwhile, you can find this and related postings and series at Ubiquitous Computing and Communications – everywhere all the time 4, and also see Page 1, Page 2 and Page 3 of that directory.
Aligning human innovation and technological advancement with larger environmental needs 4
I have been addressing climate change and other global challenges in a succession of interrelated series in this blog, and I offer this one as a continuation to that narrative progression. My goal here is to discuss possible technology based approaches to affecting positive change here, their possible implementations, and their providers. See United Nations Global Alliance for ICT and Development (UN-GAID) 2 for Parts 1-3 of this series.
I focused in Part 1 and Part 2 on two of the most significant sources of environmental challenge that we collectively face: our seemingly ever-expanding carbon footprint as it drives global warming, and our equally expanding problem of global pollution from plastic in its many forms. And I ended Part 2 by offering these to-address topic points:
1. I am going to at least categorically discuss approaches that might be considered and attempted in remediating such challenges, and ones that are already being deployed to address them.
2. That is where detailed understandings of the issues faced and of how they might best be acted upon have to be addressed. That is where broad generalities as favored by policy makers in summits and related forums, and in their within-nation planning have to meet with and constructively respond to our day-to-day realities and actionably so. And that is where complex and even seemingly contradictory details that arise and that absolutely have to be addressed in all of this are emerging, and unavoidably so.
3. Actually addressing those challenges will call for our more fully acknowledging, understanding and actively responding to them and even in the face of our having to challenge our own short-term interests – and certainly if we are to effectively and sustainably address them so as to achieve long-term benefit.
4. But at least as importantly, this effort has to include active consideration of possible side effects and collateral changes that developing and deploying possible remediation tools might bring – where some of them as proposed could be as bad as or even worse than the initial problems that they are intended to help solve.
5. Then moving further forward and to put this overall line of discussion into context here, I will discuss the Who and How of providing, selecting and using, and performance reviewing these tools and their technologies here.
6. And I will discuss trade-offs in all of this too.
To bring this initial orienting note up to date as I continue pursuing the narrative laid out in those points, I began addressing them in Part 3 from the perspective of understanding and remediating global warming. And I did so there, primarily focusing on the above Point 2 and with a goal of more fully addressing Point 1 and its issues after offering an initial organized response as to what has to be addressed here in them and in any remediative action. I then ended Part 3 with this to-address note (as reformatted and edited here for greater clarity), that I offered as orientation for how I would proceed in this developing narrative:
• Address the issues just raised there (in Part 3), but from the perspective of the plastic pollution challenge that we face, as briefly outlined in Part 2.
• Then moving forward, complete a first draft discussion of the above topic Point 2, bringing Point 1 and its issues into that in the process.
• And continue on from there in addressing topic Points 3 and following too (with some further topic mixing and order changes included.)
I begin addressing the first of these three points by stepping back from the issues of plastic per se as a global pollution challenge, to consider a crucially important point that it and our growing carbon footprint (as discussed in Part 3) have in common. Both can all too realistically be compared to metabolic storage diseases as they develop as severe human and animal pathologies. Many of them, as noted in the article that that accompanying link here points to, are rare genetically recessive conditions. Though some of these conditions are caused by environmental factors, infectious disease pathogens included. Alzheimer’s disease is strongly associated with the accumulation of pathologically altered proteins in specific directly affected areas of the brain and particularly in its dopaminergic neurocircuitry. Kuru is a rare prion based disease that can and does destroy the brains of people who become infected with it. And it is just one of a class of prion and slow virus-caused encephalopathies that have been found to affect a wide range of species, including mad cow disease and more.
What do all of these conditions have in common: the two environmental challenges that I discuss here included? They are all causally grounded in the production of and the accumulation of materials that might not be problematical in low and constrained concentrations, but that accumulate to levels and concentrations that lead to severe pathological change and harm, and even death.
If that description applies to our carbon footprint and it does now certainly as I write this, it applies even more fully to the global challenge we face from our every-accumulating masses of waste plastic.
I outlined something of the collective problems that global warming as driven by our global carbon footprint, and plastic accumulation create and for all of us everywhere, in Parts 1 and 2. How and where can and should we focus our efforts in addressing such challenges? Where are the critically important nodes in any map of how these challenges have developed and in how they continue to expand and grow, that we would need to more directly address, in bringing wider ranging remediation to the overall problems that they bring? I offered a brief and selective text-based map in of key global warming issues as they interconnect with and amplify the impacts of each other in Part 3. And I turn to offer a comparable such map in words in a global plastics pollution context, here:
• Product manufacturers have seemingly endless appetites for plastic packaging materials and both to portion out and protect their offerings from damage before end users can acquire them, and for many products – and to package them so that potential buyers can physically see them as for example with food products. Plastic packaging becomes marketing in this.
• Such containers are almost always single-use-and-discard in nature, as are plastic bags that purchases would be transported in, and plastic packing materials used in larger item shipping as well.
• But more than that, a tremendous array of products themselves are made from plastic. And even when they are designed for repeated, ongoing reuse, the materials that they are made from essentially always endure longer than any conceivable useful life spans of those products themselves. So they end up being discarded too and entering our long-term plastics pollution accumulations.
Now let’s consider this at least briefly from a Point 1 perspective. What are some of the remediations that we could deploy, individually or as parts of larger coordinated efforts?
A. And obvious first step and certainly for limiting if not stopping the growth of this problem, would be to greatly reduce the manufacture and use of plastic and of single use plastic in particular and in as many usage contexts, and of as many types as practical and possible.
B. But that will still leave a wide range of plastic production and use in products that are built to last and to be repeatedly used and long-term. As noted above, long-term there is still going to be short-term and even very short-term when compared to the spans of time that the plastics that these items are made from will persist in the environment, and certainly as matters stand now for that.
C. Recycling offers possible hope here, but a great deal of the plastic that is produced and particularly the single use plastic of that (such as the plastic in disposable shopping bags) cannot be recycled and certainly at volume, with current technologies. And as has been thoroughly documented by now, only small percentages of plastics that can be recycled and cost-effectively now, actually are. Most of that still ends up in the trash and way too much of that ends up out in the open environment, as briefly quantified in Part 2 here.
D. That leads to a variety of possibilities (at the very least.) One of them is clean-up and removal of the plastic that is already in place as pollution, which might lead to recycling – where once again, that has not proven to be anywhere near as effective a remediation approach as it was expected to be.
E. Or it might lead to high temperature incineration or the use of similar degradative approaches that would be variations on the technologies that we already have in place. But any positive value offered there would be reduced by the increases in our carbon footprint that we are already challenged by.
F. Or as a third possibility, it is always possible to bury plastic and deeply and securely enough so as to sequester it from the open environment for … how long? Until it becomes a sedimentary rock constituency as noted in Part 2 with its discussion of plastistones?
G. Or should we actively seek to produce structurally and chemically stable materials like them and then lock them away from surface exposure and as fully as needed so as to take the plastic in them out of our actively changing environment?
H. That brings novel and emergent technology solutions and their possibilities into this discussion. Can that be done and cost-effectively? And looking ahead here to the issues of the above Point 4, how can we best limit the impact of the law of unintended side effects there, or in similar efforts? Prototyping and iterative improvement of new and novel approaches here, is the obvious answer and certainly where an initial smaller scale effort would show any real promise.
I. Even if stabilization and sequestration approaches can be made to work, and both safely and cost-effectively for some types of plastic, it is likely that there are no single solutions that can address this entire challenge and even when just considering the challenge of the plastic pollution that is already out there.
J. Now, how can even just that plastic be gathered in and particularly where the most dangerous forms of this are in microparticle and nanoparticle forms, as discussed in Part 2? And when plastic breaks down and it does, that is largely mechanical degradation that primarily converts it to less visible but still actively present mico- and nanoparticles.
K. Both chemical and (engineered) microbial solutions have been proposed for addressing all of this. But how can such approaches be carried out and safely so, and particularly for possible biological agents that would consume “forever chemical” plastics – but also do what?
L. I wrote in my series: Looking Beyond Our Current Global Crises and Their Specifics, as can be found at my United Nations Global Alliance for ICT and Development (UN-GAID) directory, of the challenges of proposed “global engineering” solutions to global warming. I would state here as an absolute categorical presumption that use of anything like engineered microbes as a means of reducing our current load of plastic pollutants from our environment would bring unacceptable risk of unmitigated disaster. We use plastic for positive and even essential reasons as well as for foolishly short-term reasons. And any microbes that actively preferentially degrade plastic that might be released into the environment will degrade and destroy the plastic that we want and need, as readily and as fully as it would the plastic that we do not want or need. (Do we really have to take the avoidable risk here of creating what could become our very own manmade Andromeda Strain, or anything even just somewhat like that?)
M. Control and capacity to expend, limit and stop and otherwise manage what we do in addressing this challenge, and in managing where we do this and at what scales, is important. And that has to mean our being able to adjust course as developing circumstances warrant. It means our having to reverse course and correct for unintended consequences that have been realized too. And that brings the above Point 4 into this too, if just briefly.
I am going to return to the issues of global warming and of our local, national and global carbon footprints in the next installment to this series, where I will offer a corresponding Point 1 oriented text map to what I offer here in a plastics context. I am also going to include a cautionary note warning of an example from the arena of our global plastics pollution challenge too that is based on a presumptive remediation that is already being made use of – but with largely unacknowledged costs attached.
Meanwhile, you can find this series at United Nations Global Alliance for ICT and Development (UN-GAID) 2 and at Ubiquitous computing and communications – everywhere all the time 4. And you can find related material at my Macroeconomics and Business directory pages.
Timothy Platt
Platt Perspective on Business and Technology 
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