Your industry/profession or designation (like finance or climate activist or private citizen)?

Many people and organizations perceive climate transformation as a burden, a necessary evil, instead of moving forward with anticipation toward the better and healthier world we are creating as a result.

Embedded in climate transformation is the cooperative autonomization and self-sufficiency of businesses, organizations, and the population as a real-time breathing nationwide/continent-wide battery. This includes sharing more of the economic success with them.

A critical success factor is how quickly we overcome hurdles that slow down the transformation which is trategically important for our civilization. Such hurdles or slow downs include:

* financing in organizations as well as for private households (without remortgaging the laboriously paid off belongings!)

* overcoming external bureaucratic hurdles and road blocks (approval agencies, authorities, patents (which are an economic hurdle because of the patent troll industry - see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patent_troll ))

* overcoming internal bureaucratic hurdles. Especially in larger companies with the maneuverability of a supertanker, a confusing swamp of steering committees, boards, quality gates, over-governance can slow down, grind down and wear down a project desired by a board member or a director, sometimes by years.

How can we counter this and create a bypass / fast track for these hurdles and road blocks without becoming a hurdle ourselves (e.g. through a bypass committee)?

We need an innovation sprint to save our world economy and civilization. The patent troll industry as well as the tactical and strategic patent practice battling competitors in some large companies endanger this innovation sprint (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patent_troll ). Patent trolls act in the climate crisis like a strangler fig that kills its host tree. What can we do to neutralize this danger? Ideally, a moratorium / patent suspension would be in place until a) the world is at Net Zero and on a carbon capture path that brings global temperature rise back down and b) we are safely on the path to a circular economy and we can foresee when we will have reached 100% circular economy globally. An alternative would be: for every patent, a cheap license must be granted compulsorily, not exceeding a few percent of the target price of a product. This way, such patent holders would still earn good money, but we would eliminate a transformation risk.

Behördendschungel, Genehmigungsverfahren: Bürokratie und Amtsschimmel sind Gefahren für die Rettung unserer planetaren Lebenserhaltungssysteme. Müssen wir hier Opfer in Kauf nehmen, um das größere Ganze zu retten?

Large-scale centralized climate transformation solutions are needed. Complementary, decentralized, small cooperating approaches are required for the necessary flexibility and the ability to defend them as well as for social peace. As we have seen over and over in the past lobby organizations try to secretly write their hidden agendas into national and international law to cement their oligopoly for decades to come.

Some standards are necessary as well as useful.

We often see startups being spun off from a large corporation in order to free themselves from the ballast of the large company. It may make sense to reintegrate the startup into the group later on, but sometimes it also makes sense to continue running it separately.

We need financing options that are mortgage-neutral, at least for private households, and that provide guarantees for companies, preferably without interest or at low interest, that can be interrupted to a reasonable extent for repayment - e.g. coupled with rules on whether or not an income is available. For only if families are not threatened with having their painstakingly paid-off house (their security) taken away again will they invest in a retrofit. Conceivable instruments could be e.g.: taxes and levies, spending this as an investment fund to get back a part of the electricity production profits - for what period of time? In the end, the question may be: Is it worth it to us to make the transformation happen in 15 years to keep the world economy going instead of collapsing?  But it is also clear that those who provide money must also something in return. Perhaps a global climate transformation payment would be helpful. Wherever a market is created, fraud organizes itself, and this must be contained.

Modular solutions and financing: What can we learn from micro-investments and from crowd-funding such as Kickstarter to use their approaches for the climate transformation? Could old principles like building societies revived as building blocks?

In May 2022, the German Weather Service confirmed 3 tornadoes in North Rhine-Westphalia which is very unusual. One left a 300m-wide trail of devastation in Paderborn. In addition to transformation, we must also arm ourselves with emergency plans for more disasters and consider: where and how do we need to build differently? In addition, increased risks should be adequately insured. Examples are: https://solarimpulse.com/solutions-explorer/urban-heat-vulnerability-map or heavy rain simulations.

An asset is something that is created once and that passively generates value for the creator. Example: The solar system on the roof supplies low-cost electricity to charge the electric car or to supply the machines for production with climate-neutral electricity.

According to reports from May 2022, 1.5 degrees of global warming could be reached for the first time as early as 2026. We are running out of time. Therefore, it is crucial to accelerate the transformation to the maximum. We need an exponential transformation rate to make the entire global economy climate neutral by 2035. We can counter the looming negative tipping points with positive tipping points that seem like magic. Around us, we observe such examples again and again, proving that rapid change is possible in a very short time. The iPhone was introduced in 2007 and started its triumphant march with much alike smartphones from competitors within a few years. Elon Musk is building fully automated factories with Tesla that produce everything (the machine that builds the machine). In biology, we see exponential growth through cell division and mass copying. In information technology as well (genetic algorithms, recursion, automation, machine learning - this is not about the hype wave, but solid IT architectures). In business, with templates like the Business Model Canvas or the Blue Ocean Strategy, among others, we can quickly implement topics in a standardized way and build on them. If you apply the 80/20 rule (Pareto's law) to itself with automation, you get James Schramko's 64/4 rule - see https://youtu.be/20IN0grYXEI?t=560s = 4 percent effort, 64 percent output. We need levers like this for a greatly accelerated climate transformation.

TESLA and Apple have full control over the entire economic ecosystem in their respective areas: In the case of Apple, this ranges from the App Store as a market place to the smartphones that transform geo-user data into, for example, traffic jam reports on the map. Tesla controls everything from raw material mining (lithium in Nevada) to driving data (millions of driving hours of steering assistants and for FSD - Full Self Driving). Tesla eliminates classic cost factors in the value chain, e.g. maintains no dealer network and does no advertising. First Principles Thinking / basic research played a big role in this, because it changed well-worn paths of the industry = the rules of the game. Exemplary approach: ClimateHackerz proposes a hybrid of cruise ship and airplane the climate neutral SOLAREZEP, which creates a new travel category between cruise ship and airplane speed for a good portion of the flights: https://youtu.be/eTxi13zshsg 

Buying the lowest-cost certificates and offsetting emissions with them leads, in the worst case, to coal power becoming climate-neutral on paper. It has become difficult to distinguish honorable transformation efforts from greenwashing campaigns, and yet that is precisely what is immensely important. In the medium and long term, companies using greenwashing shoot themselves in the foot. Such companies gamble away the trust of their customers and business partners. The discovery of such greenwashing practices is only a matter of time.

The Internet was created with the idea of making an attack to a central data center ineffective, because the system works in a distributed and fault-tolerant manner (e.g., for routing data sent over the network). At the same time, Internet nodes cooperate with each other. This must be implemented in the same way for the climate transformation, especially in the energy grid sector - keyword: smart grids. The new book by Prof. Volker Quaschning: "Energierevolution JETZT" (https://amzn.to/38DmtQO - currently German only) shows, for example, that a large fleet of electric cars can serve as a giant virtual battery and solve a significant part of the energy storage problem, provided the cars can exchange energy smartly in both directions (charging from the grid and discharging to the grid).

The Ukraine war is a bitter reminder of how severely we have failed to maintain our independence/autarky from some key players. We need to build defensible self-sufficiency / autarky at the continent-wide, federal and regional levels that can withstand both hacker attacks and physical attacks. We should also think about worst-case scenarios, such as a continent-wide EMP (electromagnetic pulse) that takes out all electronics and the Internet in one blast.

Even if one does not want to ban certain manufacturing processes right away, the climate transformation is a favorable time to move from disposable approaches (Caterpillar Economy) to the circular economy (e.g. Cradle to Cradle) in the design of new products, as described e.g. in "Doughnut Economics" by Kate Raworth. Because this saves us a second transformation step for new products. And in the medium to long term, all products worldwide must be part of the circular economy (recyclable or reusable in a technological or biological cycle).

This example is calculated for Germany. Feel invited to do the math for your country if it is a different one.
If each of the 45 million people working in Germany in 2021 (40.9 million employees, 3.9 million self-employed) were released for 4 hours per week to work on climate transformation, that would be an implementation force of about 4.5 million man-years in a single year. I believe to remember that only about 400,000 people actively worked on the US-moon landing in the 1960s. That would be ten times as many in Germany. What could we do with these resources? Google has shown how such a release (of 20%) for own projects has resulted in huge successes that have changed the world - e.g. Google Street View is such a side project of an employee.

Energy density in liquid propellants is their huge advantage, and hence currently the military's preference. At the same time, some (at least older) equipment will swallow anything that burns - from salad oil to heavy fuel oil to liquor, gasoline or diesel - whatever is around. In a transformed world, however, the primary source of energy will be electricity, not liquid fuel, because so far the production of "green fuels" is not yet economically viable.

In his article, Martin Corney suggests a carbon extraction quota. "If your bathtub was overflowing, you wouldn't immediately reach for the mop, you'd first turn off the tap. That's what we need to do with fossil fuels." https://martinsgreenworld.blogspot.com/p/carbon-extraction-quota.html . It is clear that the sooner we interrupt the fossil production chain (which itself also generates emissions), the faster we will reach the climate targets. Possible solutions are: Do not buy or use any oil, gas, coal or derived products as soon as possible. But also: Do not provide your labor to such harmful companies anymore. Remove them from your customer list. Contribute to a scenario where they cannot buy any more know-how and manpower for their harmful activity, so that their business becomes unprofitable even faster.

The conflict here: Many such damagingly operating companies are simultaneously operating on two tracks, massively expanding their renewable energy business while holding on to business models that are doomed to extinction. Shell can act as an example here: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/caroline-dennett-6161a814_jumpship-truthteller-activity-6934409781495431168-7l1f and Shell in transformation: https://shellrecharge.com/en-us/solutions . To promote transformation with shareholder influence, https://www.follow-this.org/ buys shares in the fossil-fuel industry.

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