Outpaced

Faster Than You Thought

The fossil fuel industry is the world’s largest industry sector. And it’s in serious trouble. But how much trouble?

I predict they’ll have a Kodak moment, soon, all because of this one fact: The cheapest way to make energy is no longer to burn stuff, it’s to point something at the sun.

For decades, solar lagged. Partly because oil, coal and gas was so cheap it was woven into every aspect of society. And because governments subsidise it (fully 7% of global GDP). And also because corporations monopolise and hoard these hard-to-extract resources.

But nobody can do that with sunlight, which falls equally on everybody’s roofs.

Right now, in China, they’re installing 20,000 solar panels a second. That’s one gigawatt of new supply a day. Those numbers meant little to me until I learned that an average coal-fired power plant puts out the same one gigawatt. Even California is using 40% less natural gas than it did two years ago. Pakistan put up the equivalent of half their national power grid in solar just last year. Germans have put up more than 1 million solar collectors on apartment balconies.

I could go on with the italics, but you get the picture. This isn’t just steady progress. This is an asymptotic curve that’s going off the chart.

I hear some skeptics amongst you ask, “But what about the lithium we need for batteries? Where’s that coming from?”

Good point. It turns out that lithium is valuable enough that we’ll recycle it from our used batteries. In fact, we can get all the critical minerals we need for the globe’s transition to solar for the next 25 years, from the equivalent volume of one year of coal mining.

Many now accept that the energy status quo is destroying our planet, and fast. But the new energy status quo is coming faster. Let’s see if we can build the science, alongside the commercial realities, and the regulation we need to make it all possible, at speed and scale.

Question: Other than energy, what other innovations can you adapt far more quickly than you first thought?

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Self-Blinding

The year is 1937. Joseph Stalin announces a census. He is confident it will prove what he’s been boasting: that the Soviet Union is prospering, and each year it’s adding the population of Finland.

But, he was lying. The census instead revealed that the population was 10 million less than Stalin said it was. Famine and emigration both did their work. (As a footnote, the census also revealed that most most Russians were not atheists, but believers).

Stalin’s response? He had the Chief of the Census Bureau, Oliimpiy Kvitkin, executed.

Last week, Donald Trump fired Erika McEntarfer. She was the Chief of the US Bureau of Labor Statistics. Her offence? For reporting that employment growth had slowed. Despite tariffs. Despite the Big Beautiful Bill. Like in Stalin’s Russia, all of the Republican congress fell into line behind these ‘truths’.

A London bond trader, Bill Blain, rightfully raised this alarm: “Friday, August 1 might go down in history as the day the U.S. Treasury market died. There was an art to reading U.S. data. It relied on trust. Now that is broken — if you can’t trust the data, what can you trust?”

Information to fit political needs is what we’re seeing here.

Businesses need trusted data to plan investments. Institutions need data to confidently provide credit. Governments need it to intervene in the economy. Academics need it to conduct research. And, we all need it, to retain the hard-won (and data-driven) prosperity of the past 100 years.

Question: How do you support — and protect — your most trusted sources of guidance?

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Obstacle? What Obstacle?

This is the most manoeuvrable car on earth. It’s called a Sherp. And, perhaps unsurprisingly, it’s Ukrainian.

This vehicle considers water, rocky terrain, brushwood — and even thin ice — its natural home. Its inventor, Alexei Garagashyan, has the mantra: “Obstacles don’t block the way; they are the way”. And, to achieve this, his design brainwave was this: massively oversized tyres that can inflated and deflated from within the cabin.

But who buys these things?

Geologists, oil workers, rescue agents, fishermen, hunters, extreme drivers, and travellers. They are even used by the UN to get food to some of the most inhospitable, roadless places on earth.

Instead of designing around constraints, the most innovative organisations I work turn their biggest obstacles — limited budgets, complex regulations, hard-to-reach populations — into their competitive advantages.

Question: How you design your way free of what others would consider an obstacle?

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As always, I love knowing you’re reading, so please take a microsecond and click the heart. If you’ve got more time than that, drop me a line and let me know what thoughts these trigger in you.

I’ll be with you again next week,

Andrew