energy

24 February 2017

Posted on February 24, 2017 1 Comment

Last week-end, back-to-back with the G20 meeting of foreign ministers, the 2017 Munich Security Conference gathered diplomats, politicians, and military/security experts to talk about the future of transatlantic relations, of NATO, and of the EU, and about the security situation of the Middle East and the Pacific under the banner “Post-Truth, Post-West, Post-Order?“. Every February, I follow this meeting to monitor the growing securitization of development. As usual, the curtain raiser for the conference does a good job at pulling together great infographics in one place. Four points that I did not see in headline news but caught my attention. One, I heard Angela Merkel, Bono and SG Guterres say that investments in girls’ education and empowerment were key for peace and security. Two, in his closing remarks the Chairman of the Conference proposed “to complement the 2% goal [ie NATO’s recommendation to spend 2% of GDP on defense] with a larger 3% goal [focusing on] defense, foreign policy, development assistance”. This proposal is in line with the growing focus of politicians on the development/security nexus. While this not new, it is now put forward in blunt terms. See for instance EU Foreign Affairs Mogherini’s quote: “Investing in development, investing in the Sustainable Development Goals, investing in humanitarian [aid], is not charity. It is an investment, a selfish investment, in our security”. This rhetoric might help rallying taxpayers, but it can also negatively affect financial flows to those in need. Just last week, I flagged how aid was moving away from far-away conflicts towards humanitarian contexts with direct ties to EU migration. Three, last year, the Munich conference held its first ever panel on global health security…at 10 pm. This year the “small bugs, big bombs” panel was programmed mid-day and pulled out the big guns: Bill Gates, Paul Kagame, David Miliband, Stefan Oschmann, Peter Salama, and Erna Solberg. Setting the stage, Bill Gates pointed to the connections between health and international security saying that we were ignoring them at our peril. He called for an “arsenal of new weapons—vaccines, drugs, and diagnostics” and argued that we needed to “prepare for epidemics the way the military prepares for war”. And this year for the first time, climate change, previously systematically addressed together with energy security, got its own “climate security” panel. Fourth, an energized 13-min speech by SG Guterres is worth watching as it gives a good sense of where the house is going. If you don’t have time, watch the 2-min “deep” UN reforms part [8’45’’-11’] covering: (i) peace and security strategy, operational set up, and architecture; (ii) the development system coordination, accountability, and evaluation; and (iii) management. He wrapped up his statement on the need to look into new issues which are changing the nature of relations in our world, and possibly defining the crises of tomorrow. He named AI, genetic engineering, and cyberspace. And he called “absolutely crucial” the development of a “capacity of analysis and discussion to be able to think about models of governance for these new areas that will be essential in our lives in 10 years.” Hear! Hear!

Even though I canceled my account 7 years ago, Facebook was in my face all week. First, Mark Zuckerberg came out with a manifesto: Building a global community. Wow: Is this where the new international order is going to come from? This week, Facebook also made it possible to wire money internationally via its platform, walking in the footsteps of Tencent whose messenger + payment combo revolutionized the banking sector in China. This is one of the peripheral trends reshaping financial transfers to developing countries, and to refugees, in a context where remittance flows are three times bigger than ODA.

My graph this week is from Data Selfie, a Chrome extension that allows you to analyze what you do on Facebook, the way Facebook does it. Data Selfie allows you to peak behind the curtain and see what natural language processing and machine learning algorithms do with the digital crumbs you leave while browsing through your old high school friends’ vacation photos. Pretty cool.

My quote this week is from Cari Romm’s “The key to productivity is a good desk neighbor”: “Replacing an average performer with one who is twice as productive results in his or her neighboring workers increasing their own productivity by about 10 percent, on average. The effect also only worked one way: Lesser performers could improve by sitting next to more competent colleagues, but those colleagues wouldn’t find themselves dragged down by their seatmates.”

20 January 2017

Posted on January 20, 2017 Leave a Comment

The National Intelligence Council’s Global Trends report comes out every four years. This year’s “Paradox of Progress” does not bring much novelty when it comes to the list of global trends considered [summary p. 6]. The three scenarii (islands, orbits, communities) piqued my curiosity a little more, in particular the third one discussing the future of governing. In this scenario, successful countries are those who manage to share governing power with local authorities and non-state actors when responding to citizens’ needs. The idea is that national governments retain “hard power” (eg security) while “soft power” is decentralized both geographically and to other actors with technology providing some kind of partnership gel. And there is an emphasis on the growing power of human agency. International organizations get revived because they know how to bring multi-stakeholder partnerships [yes, this non-UN document uses such term] to life. I’d also recommend the first annex [p.85] offering a 3-page five-year outlooks for each region. The Artic/Antarctica and space sections are exciting, not least because they are presented as regions where international cooperation may have the brightest near future. They also got me thinking that most UN agencies do not have a regional office for these parts of the world (nor for the deep and high seas for that matter). And yet, they will increasingly matter for next generations and the natural resources, food, and habitat they will need. Should we consider piloting a desk for polar, space and sea?

It was Davos week. Global reports flooded the Swiss resort. Oxfam did it again: for the fourth year in a row they grabbed headline news with their inequality report showing that the 8 richest men have as much wealth as the poorest half of the world population. The Commission on Business and Sustainable Development report argued that $12 trillion of market opportunities could be unlocked by 2030 if companies embraced a sustainable growth model. And the Edelman’s 2017 Trust Barometer, surveying 30,000 people in 28 countries, unpacked the global trust crisis. Trust in institutions is declining across the board from governments and businesses to NGOs and the media. More than half of interviewees, including those with high-income and college degree, believe that the system is failing them. The credibility of government leaders and CEOs is at all-time low. The most credible person today is a peer (“person like yourself”). Information coming from a spontaneous speaker, relating to personal experience, and communicated via a company’s social media is more likely to be perceived as true than information with a more traditional format, style and channel. The report thus calls for a communication model that work “with the people” rather than “for the people”.

Two weeks ago, I flagged exciting trends for renewable energy generation. But green power can only boom with matching prospects on the storage and distribution fronts. This graph from the International Finance Corporation’s “Energy storage trends and opportunities in Emerging markets” offers just that. It forecasts that “energy storage deployments in emerging markets worldwide are expected to grow by over 40 percent annually in the coming decade”.

My quote this week is from Andrew Sullivan’s “I used to be a human being”: “If you had to reinvent yourself as a writer in the internet age, I reassured myself, then I was ahead of the curve. The problem was that I hadn’t been able to reinvent myself as a human being.”

6 January 2017

Posted on January 6, 2017 Leave a Comment

It’s New Year’s resolutions season. Increasing productivity remains on my worklist. Many of you wrote last year after I shared tips to deal with two major distractions: meetings and emails. On the latter, I found more good stuff in Jocelyn Glei’s Unsubscribe: How to kill email anxiety, avoid distractions, and get real work done. It starts with facts that make readers question their habits: we spend 28% of our time on email, checking it 74 times and processing 122 messages every day. It reminds us of what email is good for (eg scheduling) and not (eg making decisions involving lots of people). It flags an important bias: people are predisposed to perceive email messages negatively. It gives a check list to cut back on email mania: outline professional goals, define a daily routine, and set expectations. The number one tip is to move to batch processing of emails, 2 or 3 times a day. Batchers are more productive and less stressed. While the book focuses on productivity, it discusses spillovers on wellbeing and is published in times of growing support for the right to disconnect.
Should we not give up email altogether? Some argue that email is here to stay in our type of business because of its many other functions, like storage and backup. But with recurrent predictions about the death of email, the growing use of instant messaging in the workplace, and my teenage daughter’s constant reminder that email is for old people, I might create some space to think about a post-email UN in 2017.

I enjoyed listening to Nesta’s Geoff Mulgan opening the 2016 ESPAS conference with “What make a prosperous society in the 21^st century?”. He uses Hegel’s dialectic thinking (history moves from thesis to anti-thesis to new synthesis) to analyze the current context and the new possibilities it offers. The thesis was an open, democratic, technology-optimistic model. We are now witnessing the dark pessimistic anti-thesis. So Mulgan calls for new syntheses that go beyond nostalgic repackagings of the old thesis. His own proposal includes: education models that prepare young people for the future and nurture their agency; public services linked to a new kind of engagement with active citizens; iterative democratic models; and participatory budgeting. This is an energizing perspective but I am left thinking: how does that participatory model work for those who are not connected, engaged, or even visible?

My graph this week is from the WEF’s “Renewable Infrastructure Investment Handbook: A Guide for Institutional Investors”. It shows that solar and wind are now cheaper than coal or natural gas. 30 countries have already reached “grid parity” (ie providing energy from renewable sources costs as much as traditional power grid generation) without subsidies. And 2/3 of the world countries will get there in the next two years.

My quote this week is from Thomas Piketty’s “Passing of Anthony B. Atkinson”: “During the past half-century, in defiance of prevailing trends, [Atkinson] placed the question of inequality at the center of his work while demonstrating that economics is first and foremost a social and moral science.”

26 February 2016

Posted on February 26, 2016 Leave a Comment

It is always good to have a look at the OECD-DAC High Level Meeting Communiqué. The main take away this time around is the expansion of the ODA definition to include certain military and security activities. The donor rhetoric used to justify the change is that “development, human rights, and peace and security are indivisible and interrelated”. This Devex article gives a good overview of what the redefinition entails. Last week I flagged how “our” issues were increasingly on the agenda of security gatherings. Here we see that “our” crowd takes steps towards securitizing ODA. Activists rang alarm bells arguing that this would take even more aid money away from poorest countries, including fragile ones. Helen Clark agreed. Let me highlight 3 other points from the Communiqué that clearly relate to our work. One, a DAC definition of “violent extremism” [footnote 19 page 16] and a list of new ODA-eligible activities to prevent violent extremism that include education; working with civil society to prevent radicalization and promote community engagement; and research on the causes of violent extremism in developing countries. This sends a strong signal that violent extremism is no longer a taboo topic for development organizations. Two, donors are revisiting the use of the Rio markers to better track environment-related development finance. We could learn from this to track the environmental contributions of development operations. Three, donors are still discussing the ODA eligibility of in-donor refugee costs. This is another trend affecting ODA flows to poorest countries.

While all tech eyes are on the Mobile World Congress, some fintech entrepreneurs are meeting in South Africa to discuss how blockchain technology could disturb Africa’s financial infrastructure the same way mobiles reinvented Africa’s communication infrastructure. Elizabeth Gould’s “Africa’s big banks are betting on fintech startups and bitcoin to beat disruption” provides illustrations of the possible transformative power for the continent and quotes Barclays’ Head of Innovation: “Blockchain could be the most significant social and political innovation to impact Africa in 100 years”.

I also need to recommend Charles Duhigg’s “What google learned from its quest to build the perfect team”. The key to a perfect team is not about members being smart or having complementary competencies. It is all about “social sensitivity”. Trust me, read this. It will speak to you.

The Money Project’s “All of the world’s money and markets in one visualization” is mind-blowing. I could not cut and paste the whole graph so below is only the tip of the iceberg. Click on the link and scroll down to discover where the world’s money is. If, like me, you thought that the accumulation of global debt was one of the scariest economic trends, think again. There is worse, big-scale worse.

My quote this week is from Bill Gates’ 2016 Annual Letter: “Within the next 15 years—and especially if young people get involved—I expect the world will discover a clean energy breakthrough that will save our planet and power our world.”