And I hate to say this, but one of the biggest obstacles is penny-ante activist types who have NO appreciation of the challenge of actually operating at the scale and urgency we are talking about and getting in the way of us doing bigger things, faster by screaming about it.
Conversation
People who have never organized anything larger than a parade. Who usually have zero appreciation for the engineering, numbers, or proportions involved. Who obsess over plastic straws and about dragging extraneous social justice goals under “big tents” so the whole thing stalls.
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They haven’t bothered to study precedents like WW2 mobilization or the Marshall Plan. They want to purity test every damn action with the mindset of a small, local vegan coop governing committee. It’s... annoying.
BUT...
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I *will* give them credit for driving up urgency, adding some pressure at the right places and times. Yes even the parades and protests and the pious letters to CEOs signed by 1000s. That helps.
But only up to a point, and far less than they think.
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Their conceit is in thinking that’s the whole thing.
That the pressure gauge attached to the fuel pump is in fact the whole engine. They seem unaware that an engine is in fact more than a pressure gauge, or that the pressure gauge us not even the most important part.
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They seem to think that just because they’re the loudest, most publicly visible piece they are the most important piece in direct proportion to the noise they make. And that more noise at all times and places always improves things. And so we get plastic-straw-onomics.
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The war-scale urgency effort is in fact starting. Your life will start getting transformed in dramatic ways at the last-mile level in a few years as the action mature. Some changes you’ll notice (EVs on streets), others you won’t (renewables fraction increasing in your grid)
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The most useful thing you can do right now is neither futile virtue signaling shit like agitating to ban plastic straws, nor adding to the pressure-rhetoric noise. These fronts are way past diminishing returns to the extent they had utility at all. The real scarcity is elsewhere.
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There is *severe* shortage of technical and administrative talent *inside* of the growing scaled efforts:
- people who can craft and run wonky proposals for funding
- people who can solve renewables tech problems
- data science people who can investigate/analyze obscure details
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Can you name specific efforts that you believe are high value and starved for talent? That kind of list could be really useful for talented people looking to get into the arena.
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Any big company with a publicly declared decarbonization goal/plan should be looking for people able to do carbon footprint modeling of operations, materials flow analysis, report functions etc. If not they’re greenwashing. It’s sector expertise + carbon expertise + data science


