There are always two sides to sustainability. One is the excitement and exhilaration of great ideas and inspiring people. And then there’s the dead weight flops from people who just don’t want to change.
In recent weeks we’ve had both. On the dead weight side of politics is the move from the National Party and possibly the Liberals to get rid of their net zero commitments. Retrograde in the extreme? Yes. Self-inflicted damage? Yes.
Another dead weight has been the depressing anti climate anti democratic news we’ve had all year from the US. This is being mimicked globally, though it’s hard to know who is influencing who.
In the UK, where the Conservatives have promised to drop emissions targets and uber conservative Nigel Farage is tipped to win an election if it was held right now, rich young (mostly) males hold garden parties to further the rise of autocratic governments and complain that Farage doesn’t go far enough.
The disruption these people want is extreme.
But let’s be clear we can be just as extreme on the climate positive side. There’s a growing number of people focused on disruption. It’s what our event next week is focused on: disruption of our building materials, building systems, precincts, financial systems – and habits.
Each one of the people speaking to these things will give you a kick of optimism and hope.
Zohran Mamdani wins
How amazing are humans? They might go down for a while but this only generates more intense and brilliant comebacks.
The win by Zohran Mamdani as New York Mayor this week was largely on the back of a Trump revolt and firmly planted in social issues – especially cost of living, which is slightly ironic for a city that prides itself as the centre of global capitalism.
Mamdani has radical ideas for free childcare, co-operatively owned grocery stores that don’t gouge their customers and rent control.
Of course, Trump called him a “left wing lunatic”. Interesting that every time someone proposes more equitable solutions, and better distribution of power and wealth, their sanity is called into question.
Upending the social/economic order is never going to be easy and unfortunately (because it’s so hard to do) it’s exactly what we need to do to win the climate wars, which have now moved with certainty past the “we’re all in it together phase” to the “you’re nuts if you think we’re going to give up our privileges and power – beside we have luxury bunkers now”.
Of course, our fearless climate warriors know that what the US administration has done is open the gates to extremes – nasty talk, nasty threats and a systematic attempt to dismantle the thin and eroding ramparts that still protect what’s left of democracy.
But they also know that when you open the door to extremes, you can’t sort and segregate the types that get through.
Which is what looks like has happened in New York.
As more than one person has noted, the one good thing about Trump is that his actions have clearly articulated the stakes and the front line.
It’s a contrast to the softly-softly approach we get towards the Albanese government because it’s nominally aligned with a climate positive agenda, while continuing to disappoint.
A clear line of distinction helps mobilise the fightback.
The view on AI from Amsterdam and politics from New York
A few weeks ago when we were in Amsterdam courtesy of Bentley Systems for its Year in Infrastructure conference we got our first insight into the fightback already underway in New York and the rest of the US.
There we were, under the cloud of conventional media reporting on all the bad things Trump is doing.
Then we interviewed Joan Michelson, who writes for Forbes and runs a beautifully named podcast, Electric Ladies, and was also at the conference.
Michelson had captured our attention with some brilliant questions at the Ask Me Anything session run by Bentley chief executive Nicholas Cumins for more than 100 journalists and analysts from around the globe.
The big topic of the event was to gain insights into where digital technologies were taking our built environment, infrastructure in particular, and more specifically, with the use of AI.
At last year’s conference, said Cumins, AI had barely made it into focus. Today it was the topic du jour.
We noticed Michelson because she asked about the elephant in the room with AI.
The story so far that day was the amazing accuracy and speed that AI could bring to the infrastructure table. There were thousands of failing timber bridges all throughout Germany for instance. Through Gaussian Splats, a new technology the company had acquired, it was now possible to create accurate images of the fault lines. Well, that was our interpretation, but see The New York Times for what else it can do:
Gaussian splatting holds a lot of promise for 3D recreation and spatial storytelling. It’s faster and more photorealistic than photogrammetry, and much easier to process and interact with than neural radiance fields — giving journalists and readers the best of both worlds.
These advantages are due to the novel way that splats reconstruct 3D scenes. In a splat, people, places, and objects are made up of a point cloud defined by gaussian functions. Each gaussian function is essentially a 2D disc assigned to a point in 3D space with attributes for orientation, color, transparency, and size. When viewed in aggregate, these coalesce into a 3D scene that can very accurately represent certain things that other volumetric captures cannot: reflection, transparency, fine detail and the qualities of the light in a scene.
Nerdy stuff. But the thing that is not nerdy and pure logic is what Michelson asked: how can we be sure that the AI and the whole suite of other advanced technologies on show during the conference are based on sound data, given that the US is busy dismantling and defunding research and science related to climate?
The adage applies: garbage in, garbage out.
Climate resilience was key to infrastructure, we’d heard and knew of course, given the location of the conference.
The event itself had opened with dramatic large screen vision of dangerous climate change and its threats – to infrastructure in particular.
But in the US it’s a “don’t see; don’t know approach”
“They just literally stopped collecting data on so many things, from NASA to whatever,” Michelson tells The Fifth Estate in the interview we recorded with her soon after the session.
“And when you talk about the built environment, you have to think about so much of that data … whether it’s geospatial data; whether it’s climate modelling.
“Obviously, you don’t want your buildings wiped out in a hurricane, or your roads destroyed or cracked open in extreme heat.”
Cumins assuage the audience with a bunch of verifications and sureties. Data would be checked and verified, he said.
Michelson said that quite possibly, the private sector will pick up where the government leaves off.
“In the United States a lot of private companies and entities and academic institutions are still collecting that data. And I realise that there’s the attack on academia as well, but a lot of those institutions are still collecting it, and they’re still verifying it.
“It’s an opportunity for the private sector to step in … thank God for the private sector at this point, which is strong in America still.”
The people are protesting – and revolting
But Michelson had even more optimistic views that, in
retrospect, flagged the New York mayoral election result.
We confess they were the first positives we’d come across in a year of reading negative mainstream stories about the US.
Trump would not send the US back to the Stone Age, Michelson said in response to our probing, “because states and companies would not let it [happen]. Actually, the states are doing a lot.”
The irony is that many of the cuts from the administration to the Inflation Reduction and infrastructure acts were to red, or Republican states.
“And frankly, there’s been a lot of hubbub about what’s been cancelled, but there’s a lot that has not been cancelled.”
A lot of money had already been allocated and spent.
The private sector and the states also have longer term views and won’t change their strategies, she said.
“The governors have to balance their budget, and they have to prepare their communities. They’re on the front lines of people going, Hey, my house is falling in the river, right? So they have to take care of their people. They don’t have a choice.
“So he can stand on his head and do cartwheels, but they’re going to find a way to have some level of resilience in their communities, because they won’t get re-elected [otherwise]”.
“I mean, in a way, this is controversial, but I’m a native New York City girl, so I’ve had that guy in my life, my whole life span. So I’m not surprised, by what’s happened.”
“There’s a lot of people with buyer’s remorse who voted for him … and are actually campaigning for Democrats right now.”
A lot of people have lost their complacency and said, “I guess it’s really in my hands. And so the people are really motivated.”
“People are out in the streets in droves. People are kicking and screaming and ranting and raving, and they’re not sitting down.
“The art of innovation is dealing with constraints. Constraints may have forced you to be more creative, and forced you to think differently and to figure, okay, what resources do I have? Where, what can I tap? What skills do I have and create a different jigsaw puzzle?”