I was thinking a lot today about the development of COVID vaccines. Back in March of 2020, when COVID really first became a thing, we were told that it would probably be years before we would see a viable vaccine for COVID as it historically took 5-years or even more than that to successfully develop vaccines for other viruses.
Now, I need to be clear that I have absolutely no medical background whatsoever; although, I did survive cancer - twice - and thus have had some really fancy chemicals shot into my body (call it education by osmosis) and I have watched all types of medical dramas over the years - St. Elsewhere, ER, House, Doogie Howser M.D. - so I know what a GSW is and how many CC's of atropine to administer to reawaken a failing heart (it's 20). But, despite this lack of formal education, I was fairly confident and conveyed this to clients (and anyone else who would listen) that we were very likely to get vaccines for COVID much faster than had been the traditional 5+ years.
My logic was simply that we had turned COVID vaccines into a new version of The Manhattan Project. Never before in the history of humankind had we put so many resources (literally tens of billions of dollars) behind finding "a cure" for a medical malady and thus the traditional 5+ years was a silly comparison. Whether one wants to credit the Trump Administration or not, Project Warp Speed and the other faster than light travel initiatives that were implemented around the world to find a viable vaccine for COVID were of a magnitude that we had not seen before when trying to discover other vaccines. The bottom line was and is: if we want to solve a problem, we can do it, but we have to dedicate the resources necessary to solve it.
Okay, but this commentary is not about COVID, nor is it a humble brag about how I predicted vaccines would become a thing much faster than had traditionally been the case (I should note that the number of things I got wrong about COVID significantly outnumbers the vaccine call). Rather, it is about the what is potentially and maybe even likely the biggest "unsolved problem" we currently face - climate change - and how the mobilization effort to find a vaccine for COVID could serve as the template.
Now, I need to be clear, I am not an expert on climate. I mean, I live in the world and I can see that storms are getting worse and more frequent, forest fires are getting worse and more frequent and extreme hot and cold spells are getting worse and more frequent. In other words - I don't need a PHD in Climatology (I'm assuming this is a thing) to tell me that there's climate change and it is causing problems.
The fascinating thing about climate change is that it is an issue that pulls in so many other issues that we are struggling to deal with. There is the obvious - energy policy - how do we "greenify" our sources of energy in order to lower CO2 emissions; the less obvious, but still pretty obvious - how do we alter energy policy and not negatively impact food production, which is almost entirely reliant on energy; and the not so obvious at all - how do we improve infrastructure so that it can accommodate our new energy policy because it is currently designed for the old energy system.
Part of the problem (or, perhaps, the whole problem) is that we cannot even agree on the problem and we certainly cannot agree on the solution. Now, this is not about climate change denial - again, I have a TV, I can look out the window, I have common sense - there is climate change.
Rather, is climate change mainly the result of coal and petroleum, and if we phase these out, do we solve the problem? Or do we have to include natural gas and even nuclear? And then what's the solution - everything runs on a yet-to-be-developed super battery or wind and solar? Or, if natural gas and nuclear are okay - do they make up the bulk of the solution? And what about the energy it takes to create green energy solutions? I mean, I have no idea how to make solar panels, but an educated guess would suggest that it takes an awful lot of energy to convert sand into glass.
What we need is a COVID-style green Warp Speed. One that puts a lot of resources and a lot of really smart people behind one goal - finding a solution. The key to this must be the willingness to not only put everything on the table, but also to take anything off the table. For example, nuclear power has some problems - see Fukashima, Chernobyl and Three Mile Island - but it is also ridiculously green from an emissions perspective (yes, there is waste that needs to be dealt with, but again, building solar panels requires an awful lot of energy). Should it be part of the solution or do we take it off the table?
Part of the problem is that the discourse right now is dominated by two sides that have intractable positions. Of course the oil industry is going to strenuously resist any plans to curtail oil production or use. And, of course, organizations such as Greenpeace are going to resist any plan that is not entirely 100% purely green (which may not actually exist as again, it takes a lot of energy to turn sand into glass).
We need a Project that puts all of this aside and gets us to a solution. The best solution will probably be one that nobody likes - the oil execs howling about not being allowed to drill the backs of whales for oil and the environmentalists howling that some owls got displaced by a natural gas well. But, without a collective will and an awful lot of dollars, we are doomed to end up with the disparate mess that we have today - soaring energy prices, because we are curtailing production in the face of rising demand; soaring food prices, because food and energy are inexorably linked; raging storms and forest fires, because we are not doing anything to solve the problem; and a system of infrastructure that is ill-equipped not only to handle today's energy system, but also any future system we might come up with.
Let's end this with a bit of a case study. Back in 2003, coal made up ~25% of Ontario's energy supply. By 2014, coal was 0% as Ontario put a plan in place to phase out all coal-fired power plants and over a decade, it followed through on the plan. Now, on its face, this was a good thing. For lack of a more artful way of saying it - coal sucks and doing away with it is unquestionably good for the environment (and canaries). By doing so, Ontario's electricity mix changed in the following way:
On its face, this looks like the desired result - I mean, coal went to zero, right? But it is also worth noting that nuclear went to 60%. I have nothing against nuclear and it seems to me that given its lack of a carbon footprint, it should be a part of any solution, but there are certainly others that disagree with this. Did Ontario plan to essentially become a nuclear powered Province? I looked and there is no evidence that it did or that it didn't. Further, and this is the bigger part of the issue, this is what happened to Ontario electricity prices over the 10-years that it phased out coal:
It is not hard to see that prices essentially doubled over the decade that coal was phased out. Ironically, this did not happen because of the lost coal-fired production (Ontario actually has a surplus of electricity and should have very low prices). Rather, it happened because phasing out coal required significant investment in new infrastructure as well as locating the power supply closer to where the people live. This proved both very expensive (Ontario outsourced much of the infrastructure investment to private businesses in exchange for onerous long-term contracts) and politically unpalatable (Ontario famously or infamously canceled the building of two much needed natural gas fired power plants in Toronto because nobody wants a power plant in their backyard). In other words, it was only a partial plan without the common sense and resources to get to a complete solution. So, Ontario ended up a lot like Springfield; although, I am not sure what Homer's electricity bill looks like.
In closing, we stand at a crossroads of sorts. Most of us (especially those with TVs and windows) recognize that climate change is a problem and that a solution is needed and soon. But climate change touches so many other issues, so simply saying that we are going to solve it ignores that we have to simultaneously solve several other issues. Further, all sides need an open mind, but currently all sides are generally closed off to any views that are not their own. But, perhaps, COVID-19 and the amazingly rapid development of vaccines provides a road map of sorts for solving these crises. We need to do away with half-assed partial solutions that are filled with pork that has nothing to do with the actual problem and instead mobilize a Project Warp Speed or Manhattan Project style solution to climate change and the myriad of other issues that are directly and indirectly related to it. It won't be easy to be sure, but neither was finding a vaccine (let alone five) for a never before seen virus inside of 9-months.