Just Finished Two Intensive Days at Collision 2019 A Very Different Type of Tech Conference/Expo

May 24, 2019 – How many tech conferences do more than try and promote what they have to sell? I have been to more of these exhibitions than I can remember over more than 45 years from the original COMDEX and CES expositions in Las Vegas to the one I attended this week called Collision 2019, held in Canada for the first time.

If you have not been to a conference/tradeshow then you have no idea how much it is an assault upon the senses when you enter the site. Collision 2019 featured an endless number of temporary theatres with key leaders in government, and technology industries, participating in giving presentations, speeches, or being part of an open panel or in Q&A (questions and answers) sessions. On centre stage we watched entrepreneurs pitch their value proposition to audiences from around the world that included angel and seed capital investors, venture capitalists, bankers, potential customers, and the intellectually curious. Startups were given the opportunity to provide an elevator pitch about nascent products and services while a panel of judges assessed mission, value proposition, and story, picking winners. What an opportunity this represented for so many entrepreneurial go-getters covering a range of key fields.

My purpose being there was to interview a number of people who I felt were movers and shakers both in government, industry, and academia, but because of timing conflicts I struck out for the most part. But I was given the opportunity to speak with Christiana Figueres, who hails from Costa Rica (one of my favourite places on the planet) and who, if you don’t know the name, has served most recently as Executive Secretary of The United Nations Framework Convention On Climate Change, and a large player in the Paris Climate Agreement of 2015.

Why had she come to Collision 2019? Because she saw in technology a portal to addressing climate change. I asked her how so?

She explained that technology is both a contributor to climate change as well as a source for innovation that can help make the greenhouse gas emissions curve turn downward.

First of all, climate technologies are being used around the world to monitor the planet’s health on an unprecedented scale.

Second, technological invention is moving us away from energy derived from burning fossil fuels, to energy from renewable sources.

Third, it is technology solutions that can help us draw down carbon emissions converting greenhouse gases into sources of energy and other useful products.

She talked about the exponential growth in damage from climate change as well as the exponential growth in the solution space derived from technological innovations such as renewable energy, batteries, smart transportation, and other inventions that are mitigating the threat.

She talked about technological growth that cannot just continue for growth’s sake but must be sustainable with both environmental and social purpose. Examples she chose include the rise of corporate self-interest to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. And how cities and financial institutions are becoming similarly focused.

But she pointed out, that in all this good news, it is the pace that is worrisome. We are not moving fast enough to mitigate the worst that atmospheric warming and sea level rise will bring.

When asked about the importance of electric transportation, she cited India’s commitment to convert all of its 2-wheel transportation to electric vehicles and do it over the next three years. But she also pointed out that in India where electricity continues to come from coal-fired powerplants, the impact on carbon emissions would be marginal.

And she noted that carbon emissions produced from tailpipes and smokestacks have health consequences, killing 7 million around the planet annually. She asked isn’t this motive enough to reduce carbon emissions?

I asked her about the environmental challenge to existing inventories of housing and buildings around the planet, pointing out that very little has been designed with carbon emissions and climate change in mind.

How do you retrofit a whole world of homes, factories, and other infrastructure?

And where is government action on modernizing the infrastructure to address the carbon problem and mitigate and adapt to the upcoming challenges we know lie ahead?

Figueres answered with two different scenarios, one focused on industrialized countries, and the other on the Developing World.

She remarked that she couldn’t understand why in the industrialized world there weren’t thousands of entrepreneurs providing rehab and retrofitting services to businesses, buildings, and homes to improve insulation and drive energy efficiencies, and why there weren’t more investments by all levels of government to improve freshwater infrastructure, build greywater systems, and find energy efficiencies. She noted that the pace of city infrastructure modernization remains far too slow to mitigate and adapt to what lies ahead.

In talking about the Developing World, she noted that the challenge remains far different since so much of the industrial and urban infrastructure has yet to be built. The opportunity there is to build infrastructure from the start that is climate change resilient.

Figueres talked about the hundreds of millions to billions who will be added to our world population between now and 2050, as we approach 10 billion on the planet, noting that almost all that growth will happen in Developing World countries. What will that mean in terms of global infrastructure development and projected costs that will be in the tens of trillions of dollars?

The cities where the majority of us live, whether in the Developed or Developing World, will need to be people friendly, not concrete friendly. Cities will need to be community organized, not highway organized. And more of the inventory of homes and buildings will need to be energy self-generating, and not deriving power from grids that are less energy efficient and costly to maintain.

Before our conversation ended, I asked her about the challenge of educating the public to understand their role in addressing the carbon problem. She agreed with me that this is an area where current actions are proving to be woefully deficient.

How many of us have actually read any of the IPCC reports that summarize the science and provide trend analysis on the issue of climate change?

And if we have read it, how many understand the language of these reports?

What is needed is far greater public engagement and picking up of the pace in addressing what the science has overwhelmingly concluded is coming.

Over the next few days I will continue to write about my Collision experience and share with you some of the nascent technology I saw, and the conversations I had. So stay tuned.