The Climate Challenge is an Engineering Challenge
Have you noticed how the public debate about climate change dominated by politicians, lawyers, activists, kids - in fact almost anyone except the people who could actually fix it: engineers?
When it comes to climate change, we are incessantly told that we have to follow the science. And diagnosing the problem and its potential consequences was certainly a massive scientific challenge.
But addressing climate change - whether via mitigation or adaptation - is going to be fundamentally an engineering challenge. How do we rebuild our energy and transport systems, our infrastructure, agriculture and cities, so that they deliver the same benefits but without burning fossil fuels?
This week on Cleaning Up I'm Joined by someone who is doing her best to answer that question. Dr Rosemary ‘Rosie’ Barnes is a mechanical engineer who runs Pardalote, her own engineering consultancy in Australia, focusing on the development of clean energy technologies. She's also the host of a popular YouTube channel, Engineering with Rosie.
Rosie started out in the wind industry, completing a PhD in composite materials structures at the University of New South Wales, Australia, before moving to Denmark to work at LM Wind Power. During the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, she began her YouTube channel and is now approaching 100,000 subscribers.
Her channel is about engineering, no punches pulled. Its top video has over 600,000 views and is delightfully titled, ‘Are Vertical Axis Wind Turbines Better?’ It dives deep into the engineering challenges and opportunities of different wind turbine designs, from component positioning to blade tip speeds.
Rosie’s latest video is all about why China is dominating the high-voltage DC cable market. If that sounds mundane, 163,000 viewers disagree.
Some takeaways from our conversation:
We need to move away from a narrative dominated by politicians and culture-war voices. Until we really take engineering seriously and actually give it its role in the net-zero transition, we are fighting with one hand tied behind our backs.
Engineers are simply not valued by society. By way of proof, there is a huge corpus of study about the philosophy of science, starting from the 1940s and with towering figures like Karl Popper, but no one’s talking about the philosophy of engineering (see the chart above). So we’re in an existential crisis for planet and society, and we don’t understand how the sector with the answer even works.
To be fair, it’s not just society. Engineers need to become better communicators, and perhaps move into the political arena themselves. But they will need some convincing. Even Rosie, a natural communicator, said she would never, never, never consider politics. Among other reasons, she didn’t think she could ‘have the same impact in politics as she could as an engineer.’
We need more engineers from all backgrounds to be leading this transition, to get low-carbon technologies to the point where they’re cheap enough, reliable enough and scaled to the point where they are undeniably better than the fossil-fuel alternative. Rosie and I talked about how to get more women into engineering, and Rosie made two great points on the topic:
Engineering thinking starts at an early age, and we need to recognise and nurture potential in young girls. This means rethinking what we interpret as relevant activities: sewing, baking, cake decorating all just as valid signs of a nascent engineer at work as LEGO castles or remote controlled cars.
As a woman, being an engineer gets easier as your career progresses. The hardest step is straight out of university when your experience is nearly identical to everyone else you graduated with (i.e. none). Once you get into that first job and start to specialise, you will differentiate yourself, and the role gets easier from there.
As an aside, Rosie and I agreed that the Australian ban on nuclear power needs to go. That doesn’t mean Australia should or will build nuclear power stations. In fact it probably shouldn’t and won’t, on purely economic grounds, and that’s fine. But the ban is counter-productive because it makes it seem that only capricious regulation is stopping Australia from entering a nuclear nirvana, when nothing could be further from the truth.
If the ban is lifted, Australians need to beware of what Bent Flyvbjerg called “strategic deception” in Episode 128 of Cleaning Up, the trick employed by nuclear promoters and Olympic Bid Committees since time immemorial: promising low costs and quick progress until political leaders are on the hook, and then letting reality rip. There is no reason to believe that Australia can deliver the best-managed and cheapest nuclear projects in the world, and every reason to worry its projects could be as over-time and over-budget as the worst of them.
Anyway, it was a real pleasure having Rosie on Cleaning Up, and the topics of our wide-ranging conversation could not have been more important.
To listen to the episode with Dr. Rosemary Barnes visit cleaningup.live, click through to Cleaning Up on your podcast platform of choice, or watch the video on YouTube here.
I agree that the engineering challenges (and opportunities) associated with meeting the climate challenge. I tend to refer to engineering challenges as the challenges of scale up, which in recent conversations is being seen as the "second valley of death" assuming that the "first valley" of initial product development is successfully traversed.
In a broader context, I see the scale up / engineering challenge as part of the technology transfer journey that all science needs to go through in order to deliver benefits to consumers at meaningful scale.
I wrote quite a long comment here and then substack insisted that I create and account in order to post it and in the process wiped my comment, but I'm not going to try and regurgitate the whloe comment again.
Very briefly, I'll just say that I agree with this, and Cameron Begley s points, but we also need to include social science/engineering as part of the solution, because from my observations a large chunk of the population are either uneducated or, more likely, just too lazy or selfish, to take the right actions, even when facilities are provided at no extra cost for them to do so.
Accordingly this comment is also aimed at @substack, not to do with this post.
Substack also informed me after I had typed my bio into my new profile that it was too long, even when I removed a 50% of what I'd typed, 250 chars is not sufficient for a proper bio.
So @substack you may like to sort these issues out.