"Less is the new more", the future of engineering - Episode 3

This post is part of a series related to the future of engineering as I see it.
This sequence of daily Swarn’s blog post will last a week, from october 12th to october 16th.
Enjoy!

Make sure you read Episode 1 and Episode 2 of our blog post series before starting the third one below!

Episode 3: Technology is dead. Long live technology!

“In real life, there are often multiple solutions to a problem, some better than others.”

To fight global warming and stay below the +2℃ scenario, the 2015 Paris agreement recognized there is a need to drastically decrease carbon dioxide emissions originating from human activities.

The green technologies allowing us to decarbonate our societies are the best candidates to support our fight against climate change and minimize underlying societal changes.
Lot of questions remain however on the economic, technical, geographical and industrial feasibility of such global scale transition towards a green economy.
Indeed, from an economic standpoint, such a transition will have a huge financial cost and, technically, many promising technologies or technical breakthroughs (fast-neutron nuclear reactors, tidal energy, crosswind kite energy, nuclear fusion, exotic energy storage, etc) are not mature yet and might never be.
From a geographical and land use standpoint, many green technologies have constraints limiting their potential: distance between the energy production and consumption locations (inducing energy losses), limited availability of cost effective locations for wind energy production, surface needs of solar energy production and competition with agriculture, etc.
Finally, from an industrial and supply chain point of view, limits also exist on the production rates and resources availability needed to produce in time the required amount of components to support a worldwide transition towards green technologies.
I then concluded that technology might support alone our societal energy transition but the physical limits described above highlight a risk that it might not be sufficient.

Damned! As a naive engineer, I’ve always been a techno-optimist humanist, trusting human capabilities to elaborate solutions to complex problems.
We might succeed in the energy transition with massive investments in green technologies, but what if, at some point, we realize physical limits are blocking us?
We can’t afford such risk! We won’t have the opportunity to try again, we have to be right the first time!
On top of that, no technology or international agreement recently led to a global reduction in carbon dioxide emissions¹, only sanitary and financial crises did. Yet we know for decades that our greenhouse gases emissions are problematic…
Why would it change now?

Are we then doomed?
I initially feared it, as I initially feared human salvation only depended on technological research efforts and investments.

Fortunately, I realized we didn’t have to become fatalists: there is a way out and we are all part of the solution, especially engineers, who will have a key role to play in this transition.
The solution I found is called the low-tech movement. It exists for decades and concepts as “less is the new more”, “low-tech is the new high-tech”² or “small is beautiful”³ rely on it.

Check now the Episode 4 of our series on the future of engineering.