With ashes on the soles of our feet and deep sorrow on the souls of our minds, we need to take this moment of despair and learn from the LA wildfires. The planet, our home, is under assault and changing.
We need to restructure how we live, work, and play in a manner that is adaptive, resilient, and sustainable. This will challenge every notion of our consumer culture and how we’ve previously built infrastructure in America.
We have available to us today, the necessary technology, tools, and intellect to evoke a predictive, preventive, and proactive posture on how communities can be rebuilt to foster a new generation of American prosperity and ingenuity.
Can we evoke dignified leadership, collective action, and common sense for the common good to rebuild and revitalize the LA region, and build a stronger America?
Sustainability Upended: Climate Mitigation was Never the Full Story
The most recent and devastating Los Angeles region wildfires should challenge everyone’s notion of sustainability. With our rapidly changing climate, we are woefully failing to keep pace with the infrastructure renewal, resilience, and adaptation that is necessary to keep us safe and secure. Underlying our deficiencies for infrastructure sustainability is the over-politicized bravado, egoism, and gotcha-moments debating whose right or wrong characterized by our pervasive political culture.
It’s sadly clear that even in moments of great need, the divisive rhetoric remains constant, pilfering our attention on what matters most. Meanwhile, millions of people remain starved for dignified leadership that can lead during these uncertain times. In our debate first driven society, our infrastructure is not failing us, we are failing ourselves. Too much time and effort are spent pointing fingers, placing blame, and creating distrust as opposed to solving our real sustainability (social, economic, and environmental) challenges.
The LA wildfires are evidence that our sustainability is not improving, rather, it is rapidly declining. Although society has had its fair share of unfathomable natural and human-provoked disasters, we have failed to evolve. The LA wildfires represent another clear indication that to survive, let alone thrive in this rapidly changing world, we must change. More than ever, we need pragmatic, commonsense, logical leaders that can guide us out of the flames toward a new shared prosperity.
The Past is Behind Us, the Future is Defined by our Decisions Today
Perennial optimists, Americans in particular, tend to believe that most issues will go away or resolve themselves over time. For decades Americans believed and lived as if they could have their cake and eat it too, particularly when it comes to consumption, economic development, and regional growth. Yet here we are choking on the cake, wide-eyed and fearful in the face of imminent destruction and death. Time and time again, event after horrific event, we watch, we debate, we shrug it off as something that is isolated and will pass us by. But we all know, cancer doesn’t just pass by. You cannot simply pray or will your cancer to go away. You need to reconcile your fear with the reality of change and act.
If left untreated or ignored, cancer proliferates from within the body until it spreads, like wildfire, and destroys any hope of recovery. For far too long, America has had “consumption cancer,” that is, a belief that we can buy and build our way out of anything and then behave accordingly. This cancer can be characterized by many nonsensical behaviors and epitomized by many material things – look at our car, house, and food culture for plenty of example. There is no point in shaming, blaming, or berating specific generations, individuals, or institutions at this point of our diagnosis. What we need to do is take this moment to take stock of our health, acknowledge our shared condition, and redefine our current reality and future prosperity accordingly.
Achieving this will require tough decisions and perhaps an entirely new way of how we conceive of modern life, including what is most important to us as individuals and as a collective society. It also beckons us to reimagine consumption, mostly likely by moving beyond “what’s trending.” We can’t bury our head in the sand and pretend our consumption culture is not overconsuming us.
The signs were all around us. The LA wildfires are not AI generated. This is the real deal, and there was no drill. The shocking scale of impact of the LA wildfires was sparked and fueled by the confluence of numerous factors, high winds, prolonged drought, densification and encroachment of housing near wildlands, outdated water infrastructure, and the generalized human element of ignorance and skepticism. Although all the environmental conditions were right for a massive wildfire, likely very few ever thought, “this would happen to us.”
Our generation needs to reassess whether it can have its cake and eat it to. The societal norms, rules, and consumer behaviors that got us to this moment need to evolve. We are being forced to redefine prosperity with pragmatism, dignity, and resolve in the face of converging global risks.
Our generation is on the front lines of a planet and society in duress. Our world is increasingly facing serious threats promulgated from climate, energy, financial, security, technological, and other risks. Many of these risks are human-made and induced. Others are truly acts of God. In either case, the prosperity, freedom and fate of society lie in the balance. We must recognize that the years of eating cake are over. We need to start making tough decisions regarding the trade-offs that are before us.
Refocusing our Attention and Resources on the Real Problem at Hand, Leadership
In responding to news coverage of the LA wildfires, my 16-year-old son asked, “why isn’t there more water available from the municipal pipes? Why can’t the firemen just use ocean water? Is there a way to remove salt from ocean water?” His questions turned into a thoughtful thirty-minute conversation between himself, mom, and me. My son’s line of reasoning was not wrong. He was asking the right questions, seeking solutions. Our family conversation, backlit by the background news testimonials from people on the frontlines, including the heroism of first responders and the immense sense of loss felt by those that lost their home, turned to what happens from here. “Why can’t we build a huge desalinization plant in LA, like they have in Dubai?” asked my son.
Our family conversation reawakened my mind’s eye toward a topic that has recaptured my thought and attention on the elusive allure of sustainability in the past couple of years. Essentially, I view sustainability as an all-encompassing pathway toward greater prosperity. Sustainability is more than “solving for X,” like climate risk through decarbonization. We represent a sustainability generation in transition, one foot in the past, one in the present, and a reach to a future that can feel uncertain. The future is, as it always has been, what we make of it. Our intentions and how we act in the here and now determine what comes next. Thus, sustainability is not represented as a singular goal or objective, but as an underlying construct of transition and transformation. It is the epitome of change management.
In that however, there are trade-offs and compromises that must be evaluated and prioritized. I don’t believe that a singular technology fix or government mandate will “save us.” I do believe however that we have the capacity and intellect to improve the world through innovation, in all its forms. There is no limit to human ingenuity. While society seems to be leaning heavily on the potential of artificial intelligence (AI), underlying the optimism tied to the automation of everything is an innate fear that humans will be rendered less useful, less intelligent. Yet as we sit here today, we represent the intellect that is fashioning the very fate that we fear.
Let’s assume for a moment that the LA wildfires are not an anomaly. The frequency, scale, and severity of climate disasters has been steadily increasing for some time now. There is no need to assume here, we know this. We’ve lived this. Let’s also factor in that with 8+ billion people on the planet, competition for resources has intensified, particularly over the past three decades, and it will continue to escalate in coming years. Again, this is well understood.
So, our collective home is under great duress. In recent years, significant investments in new technology, capital operating expenditures, and development of policy mandates have been placed on reducing the emission of carbon dioxide (CO2) and other greenhouse gases (GHG) into the atmosphere. Undoubtedly, our modern society, and in particular the developed nations that emit the majority of GHGs, need to curtail the inefficient combustion of fossil fuels and curtail and mitigate carbon and associated GHGs. But although decarbonization seems like it should be simple, is riddled with needless complexity and contradiction.
Most people want to simply have the freedom to live their lives, on there terms. The sustainability challenges challenging our generation are addressable. There is no reason we cannot continue to pursue prosperity with vigor. To accomplish this we need pragmatic, empathetic, and authentic leaders. We also need to rebuild community - not only in the physical sense of infrastructure, but also in the spiritual context of what's playing out in the greater LA region right now - people helping people out of sheer faith, joy, love, compassion, and dignity. Going forward we must bring common sense for the common good to the planning, development, and care of our communities.
Time to Assess the Sustainability Trade-Offs of Where and How We Invest
With the LA wildfires on full display, the paradox we are living in can be seen with greater contrast. We need to decarbonize, yet that takes time, and at this point, the impact of reducing carbon today will not be felt by many regions and people for decades. And then there are thousands of people in LA, now homeless and categorically defined as climate migrants, who need relief and a solution right now. The necessity to invest in climate adaptation has never been greater. However, our resources, finances, policy, and leadership intentions have been ill-aligned with the immediacy of the fire that is at our doorstep.
I’m confident that if I did the research to scour the soundbites of each major climate disaster over the past thirty years, that for each one there is someone who said, “this should be a wake-up call for society.” But here we are, eyes wide open, yet still not really awake. It is time to rethink our allocation of resources, and leadership intention, to better align with the real challenges people and communities are facing now, and have been facing, for decades. We’ve kicked the proverbial can down the road long enough. In fact, we’ve run out of the road, and there is nowhere left to go. We find ourselves pegged between a vast ocean and steep mountain, walking amid the ash, questioning how and why.
Pan out from the LA wildfires and there remains a steady stream of business news celebrating the astronomic financial performance for AI companies over the past year. Business analysts predict continued growth in tech, led by continued innovation in AI. But they caution that the Achille’s heel or limiting factor for continued exponential growth is directly tied to the availability of reliable, affordable, and clean electricity to power datacenters and advanced manufacturing facilities.
The State of California has had significant electric power utility challenges ranging from power quality and reliability, ratepayer affordability, lack of clean generation assets, power shut offs and rolling Blackouts. California’s energy grid is strained and overtaxed by high demand, climate risks including high winds and wildfires, aging infrastructure, among other concerns. California’s ongoing energy crisis and water crisis are not mutually exclusive to each other. They are intimately intertwined with severe weather and wildfires. The need for adaptive, resilient, and sustainable infrastructure solutions in California has never been greater.
The promise of advanced technology including AI is exciting for investors and tech enthusiasts. But when you don’t have access to basic energy or water services, or the ability to be properly houses, the allure of AI does not shine as brightly. I reference this not as an assault on AI or advanced tech, but as an observation on where society and investors have and continue to place their attention. We have enormous potential, here and now, with cost-effective, proven, and pragmatic technology and solutions, to design – build – maintain – and sustain an infrastructure that can be adaptive, resilient, and sustainable. Getting there, however, will require a wholesale change in mindset, on where we place leadership intention, policy and financial incentive, and community building.
Our society has traditionally built and viewed major public utilities as discrete value streams, for example, energy/electricity, transportation/mobility, telecommunications, education, security, and so on. Over the past century, advancements in technology and behavioral changes in how society engages with public utilities have not kept pace with each other. Today we have the potential to converge the value streams (i.e., the resources, operations, benefits, and impacts) of previously siloed public utilities in way that can dramatically reduce costs, enhance efficiency, and revolutionize how the infrastructure that serves us can become adaptive, resilient, and sustainable. We have an opportunity to integrate advanced technology including AI and clean energy technologies with innovations in mobility, manufacturing, and housing to create restorative, adaptive, resilient communities.
Human Dignity Rises from the Ashes of Despair
The impact of the LA wildfires was nondiscriminatory. People from all social economic backgrounds lost homes and personal possessions, and in some tragic cases, friends and loved ones. As the wildfires continued to rage, the economic impact to the region continued to rise to an estimated $100 billion in damages. For the people dealing firsthand with the wildfires, the social and psychological toll far exceeded any immediate financial loss.
Much like other mega-disasters of our time, the LA wildfires have, almost immediately, catalyzed a global response. The courage of frontline first responders and connected stories of desperation and loss have spread a wildfire of compassion across the country. Young adults have launched funding campaigns. People across the LA region have banded together to provide food, clothing, and shelter. Business leaders have stepped up to provide resources and services to aid in the immediate needs and the longer-term recovery of the people, and a region, in shock. Time and again, human dignity rises out of the ashes of despair and suffering. At our core, people are good. People are resilient. People succeed and thrive when the community is strong.
Can we evoke dignified leadership, collective action, and common sense for the common good to rebuild and revitalize the LA region, and build a stronger America?
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