Juggling Dynamite

Joseph Schumpeter popularized the economic concept of ‘creative destruction’ in the 1950’s and spoke of the vigorous push back from threatened incumbents:

“To undertake such new things is difficult and constitutes a distinct economic function, first because they lie outside the routine tasks which everyone understands and, secondly, because the environment resists in many ways that will vary, according to social conditions, from simple refusal either to finance or buy a new thing, to physical attack on the man who tries to produce it.”

Tony Seba triggers lots of angry responses and hate mail for his work. (So do I when I write about his work and other earth-friendly, efficient innovations🙃).  This only confirms that true creative disruption and innovation is underway here.  See HBR:  If you’re not pissing someone off, you’re probably not innovating.

Stanford University futurist Tony Seba spent the last decades studying technological disruptions. He argues that the Electric Vehicle, battery storage, and solar power, along with autonomous vehicles, are a perfect example of a 10x exponential process which will wipe fossil fuels off the market in about a decade. TonySeba.com – RethinkX.com .  Here is a direct video link.

Self-delusion and wilful blindness, how great thou art.  See:  Investors Seemingly Learned Nothing from History:

“…I am blinded by a sense of history…In our flat, interconnected and networked world, the odds favor less stability over more stability.

To this observer the markets’ dominos are exhibiting signs of falling around all over — in consumer packaged goods, in (T)FANG, in retail and elsewhere. Yet the selective memory of the talking heads in the business media emphasize the narrowing field of outperforming stocks (e.g., Nvidia Corp. (NVDA) and Deere & Co. (DE) ) that have been working, failing to see those falling dominoes around them.”

Someone recently told me that climate harm impacts were not imminent but rather something that would be a problem for future generations. Perhaps this thinking is a coping mechanism. Perhaps it’s a way to avoid making personal changes needed.  Either way, it’s delusional.  The costs (and solutions) are here now, if we chose to see them.

As a series of destructive hurricanes hit the United States, devastating floods in South Asia have killed more than 1,300 people. “[Bangladesh] is the most densely populated country in the world. … It’s becoming a situation where we will have have hundreds of thousands of climate refugees,” says Muhammad Yunus, founder of Grameen Bank and recipient of the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize. His new book is titled “A World of Three Zeros: The New Economics of Zero Poverty, Zero Unemployment, and Zero Net Carbon Emissions.”  Here is a direct video link.