Yes. Yes it is. Venomous Lumpsuckers, a fictional novel by Ned Beauman, beautifully illustrates what I consider to be a new take on the idea of a silent spring. Not only is the writing clear in the most essential sense of that term, but it's also erudite and even gripping at times. Importantly, the characters deal with some of the deepest philosophical questions of our time. However, in this blog post I'll focus on how it's a new kind of silent spring. (For related philosophical musings, see my previous post about the coming moral Copernican revolution: "The Next Copernican Revolution Is A Moral One": https://world.hey.com/cipher/the-next-copernican-revolution-is-a-moral-one-49bd62d5).
Venomous Lumpsuckers takes place in spring time in Northern Europe. Our main characters are a serious "species intelligence evaluator" and a smarmy "bioinformatics" salesman. Global warming has surpassed 2 degrees celsius and the effects are felt by everyone everywhere. A global extinction credit market was created, similar to carbon credits, so that companies have a greater incentive to track the animal species whose habitats they are destroying.
Where Silent Spring taught us the terrible lessons of unregulated pesticide use, Venomous Lumpsuckers teaches us the terrible lessons of our inability to change our collective ways of life in order to end global warming. In Silent Spring the silence was from a dying ecosystem, literally no more bird calls, because they had died. In Venomous Lumpsuckers the silence is from humanity, in the form of a collective shrug, and an inability to technology our way out of climate change.
First, let's set the stage of our current reality. Consider that there are thousands of companies across the globe today who claim to have products that help solve climate change. From this 2023 MIT review, https://www.technologyreview.com/2023/12/02/1084059/climate-tech-startups-are-back-and-this-time-they-might-survive/ we find a typical refrain: "A slew of [climate tech] startups are now rapidly moving toward commercialization, providing the first steps toward industrial decarbonization and adoption of radically new energy sources [...]. But these startups still face some of the same issues that tripped up the cleantech revolution a decade ago." In a graph titled US Venture Funding in Climate Tech, investments peaked in 2021 at around $28 billion and dropped down to around $8 billion by 2023.
Although the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act tried to jump start investment again, the new administration and Republican congress aren't likely to follow through, given their quick reversals of EV and solar tax credits and the blocking of nearly finished off shore wind energy projects. It's important to note also that the MIT review, despite it's optimistic tone and incessant use of positive phrases like 'sales taking off', 'massive potential', and 'rapidly moving toward commercialization', nevertheless makes a damning case against investing in this area, because they show that statistically the returns are worse than other types of investments.
One company highlighted in the article, Boston Metal, is perhaps an outlier in that it's doing relatively well. However, this company was founded in 2013 and is still preparing for its first commercialized plant. Let me repeat that: after twelve years of development, they remain non-commercialized. The next breakthrough green technology might be right around the corner, but *commercializing* it could remain decades off. All the while we continue to pump an increasing amount of CO2 into the atmosphere.
Consider the around $6 billion Orsted, the Danish energy group, put into the Revolution Wind project off the coasts of Rhode Island and Connecticut. That's one of the projects that the current administration is trying to stop. To put it into perspective, the amount Orsted stands to lose is about 75% of the entire 2023 venture funding in US climate tech. While the current administration is pushing nuclear energy, something that will help the US produce more clean energy, it remains to be seen when and how that push translates into reality. Shiny new data centers powered by nuclear energy is great, but we need to actually reduce the amount of carbon dioxide we're putting into the atmosphere, not merely slow the increase.
Venomous Lumpsuckers takes place in 2060. This is fitting, because tech startups have taught us to imagine a near future and act as though we live there now. Yet, around 10% of startups fail in their first year and a whopping 70% fail within three to five years. Climate tech, clean tech, and green tech are no exception. In fact, they may be worse if you consider the difficulty and complexity around bringing hardware and industrial products to market. When we think of startups we probably often think of software startups. It's much cheaper and quicker to build software. That's because hardware and industrial products involve far more capital intensive work and face considerable external challenges trying to make it to commercial viability. It's not just that it takes longer and is more expensive. There are all kinds of unforeseeable real world circumstances, including basic physics and chemistry, that can get in the way.
In Venomous Lumpsuckers we encounter technology after technology that either went no where, found a neat niche but didn't revolutionize anything, or which failed spectacularly. The way the author, Ned Beauman, handles this is deft and quite ingenious. The main characters encounter these technologies in normal everyday life. Nothing feels too out-there or unbelievable. In fact, it is the believability that struck me. It is the way the characters are surrounded by the promise of new technology precisely the way we are today. Precisely the way we were ten years ago. Or twenty years ago. And that's exactly the striking feature of this story, that it gets that across subtly, using our everyday language and experience, until the foreboding portents underlying it poke out. And you can't unsee it again.
No one knows what the future will bring. Fusion energy may be around the corner. Or it may yet be 50 or 100 years away from commercial viability. It's into this yawning chasm of unknowability that the new silent spring takes form. After all, we've already passed the point of no return on some of the effects of anthropogenic climate change, and we continue to pump ever greater amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere. Will our future be like the one described in Venomous Lumpsuckers? No one knows for sure. But after reading it, I find current silence is deafening.
Venomous Lumpsuckers takes place in spring time in Northern Europe. Our main characters are a serious "species intelligence evaluator" and a smarmy "bioinformatics" salesman. Global warming has surpassed 2 degrees celsius and the effects are felt by everyone everywhere. A global extinction credit market was created, similar to carbon credits, so that companies have a greater incentive to track the animal species whose habitats they are destroying.
Where Silent Spring taught us the terrible lessons of unregulated pesticide use, Venomous Lumpsuckers teaches us the terrible lessons of our inability to change our collective ways of life in order to end global warming. In Silent Spring the silence was from a dying ecosystem, literally no more bird calls, because they had died. In Venomous Lumpsuckers the silence is from humanity, in the form of a collective shrug, and an inability to technology our way out of climate change.
First, let's set the stage of our current reality. Consider that there are thousands of companies across the globe today who claim to have products that help solve climate change. From this 2023 MIT review, https://www.technologyreview.com/2023/12/02/1084059/climate-tech-startups-are-back-and-this-time-they-might-survive/ we find a typical refrain: "A slew of [climate tech] startups are now rapidly moving toward commercialization, providing the first steps toward industrial decarbonization and adoption of radically new energy sources [...]. But these startups still face some of the same issues that tripped up the cleantech revolution a decade ago." In a graph titled US Venture Funding in Climate Tech, investments peaked in 2021 at around $28 billion and dropped down to around $8 billion by 2023.
Although the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act tried to jump start investment again, the new administration and Republican congress aren't likely to follow through, given their quick reversals of EV and solar tax credits and the blocking of nearly finished off shore wind energy projects. It's important to note also that the MIT review, despite it's optimistic tone and incessant use of positive phrases like 'sales taking off', 'massive potential', and 'rapidly moving toward commercialization', nevertheless makes a damning case against investing in this area, because they show that statistically the returns are worse than other types of investments.
One company highlighted in the article, Boston Metal, is perhaps an outlier in that it's doing relatively well. However, this company was founded in 2013 and is still preparing for its first commercialized plant. Let me repeat that: after twelve years of development, they remain non-commercialized. The next breakthrough green technology might be right around the corner, but *commercializing* it could remain decades off. All the while we continue to pump an increasing amount of CO2 into the atmosphere.
Consider the around $6 billion Orsted, the Danish energy group, put into the Revolution Wind project off the coasts of Rhode Island and Connecticut. That's one of the projects that the current administration is trying to stop. To put it into perspective, the amount Orsted stands to lose is about 75% of the entire 2023 venture funding in US climate tech. While the current administration is pushing nuclear energy, something that will help the US produce more clean energy, it remains to be seen when and how that push translates into reality. Shiny new data centers powered by nuclear energy is great, but we need to actually reduce the amount of carbon dioxide we're putting into the atmosphere, not merely slow the increase.
Venomous Lumpsuckers takes place in 2060. This is fitting, because tech startups have taught us to imagine a near future and act as though we live there now. Yet, around 10% of startups fail in their first year and a whopping 70% fail within three to five years. Climate tech, clean tech, and green tech are no exception. In fact, they may be worse if you consider the difficulty and complexity around bringing hardware and industrial products to market. When we think of startups we probably often think of software startups. It's much cheaper and quicker to build software. That's because hardware and industrial products involve far more capital intensive work and face considerable external challenges trying to make it to commercial viability. It's not just that it takes longer and is more expensive. There are all kinds of unforeseeable real world circumstances, including basic physics and chemistry, that can get in the way.
In Venomous Lumpsuckers we encounter technology after technology that either went no where, found a neat niche but didn't revolutionize anything, or which failed spectacularly. The way the author, Ned Beauman, handles this is deft and quite ingenious. The main characters encounter these technologies in normal everyday life. Nothing feels too out-there or unbelievable. In fact, it is the believability that struck me. It is the way the characters are surrounded by the promise of new technology precisely the way we are today. Precisely the way we were ten years ago. Or twenty years ago. And that's exactly the striking feature of this story, that it gets that across subtly, using our everyday language and experience, until the foreboding portents underlying it poke out. And you can't unsee it again.
No one knows what the future will bring. Fusion energy may be around the corner. Or it may yet be 50 or 100 years away from commercial viability. It's into this yawning chasm of unknowability that the new silent spring takes form. After all, we've already passed the point of no return on some of the effects of anthropogenic climate change, and we continue to pump ever greater amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere. Will our future be like the one described in Venomous Lumpsuckers? No one knows for sure. But after reading it, I find current silence is deafening.