Forecast & Outlook: Our evolving knowledge base and capacity to design molecular manufacturing systems will be a primary driver of social and economic change in the decades ahead. Bioindustrialism and the Nanoscale design of carbon-based structures are two ‘game-changing’ ideas ripe for capital investment and commercial applications. Properly harnessed, carbon bonds are our best eco-friendly building block for improving quality of life and wealth creation in the next century!
Carbon Capitalists of the World Unite! It is time to move beyond today’s politically and emotionally-charged ‘climate & carbon’ conversation and move towards something more constructive based on bigger ideas, not bigger battles.
The problem isn’t the gap between ‘OECD’ vs ‘Non OECD’ national interests. The problem is the gap between what many people ‘want to do’ versus what we are able to do based on our current industrial and energy paradigms.
Instead of demonizing carbon we should be embracing it around bigger ideas that remain off the radar of activists, politicians and most business leadership. We need to make the foresight case that in this century no molecule will be more important than carbon as a source of wealth creation and platform for uplifting the quality of life of people, planet and profits.
Carbon Capitalists of the World Unite… around Bio & Nano!
Capital capitalists are builders not bankers. There is minimal value created via fees or trading schemes based on carbon pricing mechanisms. True carbon capitalists see carbon as a resource for building added value products like biomaterials and biofuels.
Carbon capitalists transform the conversation by expanding the marketplace beyond CO2 trading into an industrial and energy era defined by carbon+hydrogen chains assembled for biomaterials and bioenergy, and/or carbon+carbon or carbon+metals for industrial catalysts and high performance materials.
Carbon capitalists are those people focused on reinventing the physical world and consciously evolving our global industrial paradigms around two 21st century platforms for prosperity: bio-based industrial processes and nanoscale materials engineering.
Bio Industrialism
The first ‘leap’ for Carbon Capitalists to make is from chemistry to biology.
The great industries of the last century emerged from advances in chemical engineering and materials processing. Thebirth of modern industries including pharmaceuticals, polymers, to semiconductors were all based on new ‘chemical industrial’ paradigms. The consumer economy exists only because we have created abundance via synthetic (not naturally occurring) materials. The ‘information age’ exists only because we created materials that could manipulate electrons and photons. So your iPhone is as much a triumph of chemical engineering as it is software engineering.
Chemistry is not going away, in fact, its role in the ‘nano’ age is likely to evolve in ways we cannot imagine. But there is a ‘new kid on the block’ that is capable of changing our industrial base.
Bio Industrialism is a broad concept for any goods (or services) delivered via a biological process or byproducts (e.g. biological agents for low cost pharmaceuticals, algae or cellulosic based biofuel production, et al). So if chemistry helped give birth to many of our largest 20th century industries, it is biology that will likely to be the platform for new industries in the 21st century. We will explore these new industries in future posts!
[Related fields and concepts: synthetic biology, bio-energy, bio-materials, biologics (biopharmaceuticals), biomechantronics, biomimcry, genomics, proteomics, bioplastics, ‘green chemistry’, biocatalysis, bioimaging, biosensors, et al]
Industrial Age of Nanoscale Materials (From ‘micro’ to ‘nano’)
The second industrial paradigm ‘leap’ is based on a new scale for materials design. We have reached a plateau in our performance properties of ‘microscale’ (millionth of meters) design to ‘nanoscale’ (billionth of meters) engineering in which we control precise formation of molecules to yield entirely new performance properties of basic elements.
The nanoscale era of materials design redefines what we think of as a ‘resource’. In this future carbon-carbon bonds can be designed to perform on par with higher cost precious metals. In this future ‘carbon’ emissions can be re-assembled (and resold in the marketplace) with hydrogen bonds using the metabolism of algae.
Nanotechnology is often sold around more futuristic concepts like ‘nanobot’ machines floating through your bloodstream. But the near term future is much more sober.
‘Phase One’ for nanoscale materials engineering is based on materials design using: carbon nanotubes, nanoparticles and nanosheets (graphene) in a range of applications from energy production and storage and conversion, high strength composites for light weight airplanes, cars and textiles, to new ways of building electronic devices from carbon (instead of silicon).
Hype Warnings & Core Assumptions
I want to be clear about my message! Professional futurists often warn audiences: ‘avoid the mistake of overestimating the amount of change likely to happen in the short term, but avoid a bigger mistake of underestimating how much change might happen in the long-term.’
Today it is easy to dismiss ‘nano’ and ‘bio’ as too futuristic so I want to be clear about two assumptions that I hold quite comfortably at the same time:
- Neither of these industries (Bio & Nano) will be ‘big’ anytime soon
Real GDP growth over the next two decades will likely come from old industrial activities (e..g iron-ore/steel, geo-extraction, et al). Both ‘bio’ and ‘nano’ related industrial activities are operating at early stages of development, and are likely to favor the incumbent platforms in the short-term before they are able to supplant them. In other words, the first wave of commercialized nanostructured materials (coatings, nano-tubes/particles, et al) are likely to improve performance of old micro-structured materials in the short term.So we must adjust our expectations about how fast these industries can grow! But avoid making the mistake of waiting too long to start as we think of skeptics who dismissed the case for ‘synthetic plastics’ and ‘electronics’ in the 1950s and the ‘Internet’ in the 19990s!
- Both of these industries will dwarf all historical ‘industries’ known to man
In the long term, bioidustrialism and nanoscale engineering profits will surpass any and all economic values created by industries that exist today. They are emerging at the exact right time – as billions of people transition into new demographic phases (e.g. aging) and socio-economic levels (e.g. middle class). And their impacts are likely to be felt across all industrial sectors from energy, human health/wellness, military, transportation, information technology, et al.
So let’s be clear!
I’m not ‘hyping’ bioindustrialism or nanotechnology in the short term!! I am trying to open a door for two platforms of wealth creation in the 21st century.
From the standpoint of the ‘carbon conversation’ we need to move forward around bigger ideas, not bigger battles. Bioindustrialism and Nanotechnology are big ideas!
Upcoming posts:
In my next ‘carbon capitalism’ post I will look at companies redefining our industrial base by tapping the power of carbon molecules!
Suggested Readings:
OECD report: The Bioeconomy to 2030 report is available at www.oecd.org/futures/bioeconomy/2030.
The Carbon Age – by Eric Roston http://www.ericroston.com/
