It’s getting harder and harder to find glimmers of hope, with wildfires and record heat and floods and droughts coupled with global inaction from many governments and international organizations. And I know that, if all climate degradation ended RIGHT NOW, things would still get worse before they got better. So, yeah, hard to be at all hopeful.
So I cling to the financial newsletters I get, because the only hope I’m seeing lately comes from reading about big money hopping on the Green Economy bandwagon.
All this money flying around has me thinking about where and how value will be created. There will be benefits to the climate, the environment, company operations, and balance sheets, of course. But there’s another area worth exploring, and that’s the value of networks.
Nathaniel Bullard, Bloomberg Green Sparklines
Six years ago, venture capital investor Chris Dixon wrote a short but thoughtful essay on how networks evolve by attracting users to a single, often quite simple tool. “The tool helps get to critical mass,” he said. “The network creates the long-term value for users, and defensibility for the company.”
According to Bullard, a good tool naturally attracts users, users deploy the tool in ways most beneficial to themselves, like-minded users are attracted to both the initial tool and to the uses, and bing-bang-boom, you’ve got a network. If that network is in pursuit of the same general goal — say, making money by co-incidentally saving the planet, we’re in luck. Sort of like how the fossil fuel network has consistently and powerfully worked to make money by co-incidentally wrecking the plant, only the opposite.
Fingers crossed.
A WRITING PROMPT FROM ME TO YOU: Write about a network.
MA
Alicia Butcher Ehrhardt
July 30, 2021 at 2:04pmIt should be to SOMEBODY’S benefit to save the planet. Terraforming is expensive. Not terraforming is more expensive.
Marian Allen
July 31, 2021 at 10:02amAbsolutely.
acflory
July 30, 2021 at 11:10pmI truly don’t believe in the efficacy of ‘market forces’. Certainly not when it comes to climate change. They’re just too…slow. Plus, at the moment, the users have been given no overwhelming /advantage/ to go to renewables. If our powers bills were halved from one day to the next, then we’d probably listen, and invest. At the moment power distribution is still overwhelming biased towards the old tech. I have quite a bit of solar but not enough to go off grid, so I get a pittance for my solar power while paying through the nose for the dirty stuff. We’re still in a holding pattern. 🙁
Marian Allen
July 31, 2021 at 10:06amMy local electric co-op has a solar farm just outside of town. Sara was stunned, when she moved here from Louisville, how much less electricity costs. My only hope from the markets is that pressure from people poised to make money from renewables will tip the balance. And I agree that waiting for market forces to change things for the better is too slow, but every drop in the bucket helps fill the bucket. I just NEED something to hold on to while I’m going down the drain.
acflory
July 31, 2021 at 6:34pm-sigh- There’s truth in what you say. Back in 2007 the govt of the day believed in climate change and provided really good incentives for people to invest in rooftop solar. Back then, the money you saved from feeding excess power back into the grid paid off the cost of the solar in 5 years. Bit by bit that feedin tariff was reduced until now it’s about 1/3 of the /cost/ of dirty power. Much of this is because the current, conservative govt really really doesn’t want to do anything about climate change. So the industries poised to upgrade into renewables don’t dare take the plunge. But, the groundswell is growing. I cling to that. 🙁