In the 33rd episode of the series is Jyoti Banerjee, co-founder of North Star Transition.
I first met Jyoti a quarter of a century ago and have always known him for focusing on better corporate reporting and finance. He has been globally influential in the Integrated Reporting movement. More importantly, he has also been an "impact investor" for two decades in various greentech/cleantech initiatives around the world. I heard him present on his work on the Wales Transition Lab and invited him to be part of this series. I like the systemic thinking he is bringing there by involving farmers, insurance companies, public health, environmental and other government agencies.
As background, in The New Polymath, I had written about the globe's "Grand Challenges". I have been frustrated at the progress over the last decade. Jyoti is similarly frustrated at how little progress we are making on the environment and other sustainable goals. My view of systemic thinking, however, is slightly different than his. As some of you know I have developed my "multiple locomotive" model from my travels to over 70 countries. In my view the biggest, most affluent countries need to all step up to power the global "freight train" when it comes to the environment, trade, immigration, policing of hot spots and many other challenges. It has been easy to expect the US and couple of other countries to carry most of the burden.
You can see both our points of view come out in the episode. I tell him he is expecting too much from corporations in the Western world when we should also be calling out China, India, Russia, Germany, Japan and many other countries. Why continue to criticize the US whose emissions have been going down for the last decade and not challenge China which is now the world's biggest polluter and just accept their 2060 Net Zero emissions horizon? If things are really dire, we cannot be giving concessions to India, Russia, China and others to continue to use coal. Offline, I told him after more than a decade EVs still have only 3% global market share. Part of the reason - even with 25% lighter bill of materials, EVs are priced 50% or more than internal combustion vehicles. In most countries, the utilities that power EV batteries still largely run coal and fossil fueled plants. Solar and wind are still not that competitive in spite of massive subsidies. In some ways, that makes your EV dirtier than your Humvee. We should have the courage to call out ALL the slackers.
Definitely watch starting at 14.00 what he describes of his work in Wales and what he describes around the systemic work in Finland around cardiac health But please watch the whole episode. You may not agree with everything Jyoti or I say, but it will hopefully make you challenge simplistic mainstream, woke thinking and get impatient like the both of us with ALL the slackers.
