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Back to (Engineering) School

01.19.22 | Blog | By:

In the aftermath of World War II, a tacit covenant was signed between recovering democratic regimes and exhausted citizens, aiming at improving the living standard, or spending power, which was over time translated into growth as a political religion, above everything else. By the seventies, alarm bells started to ring, like the Meadows report, signaling excessive use of Planet Earth resources and dire consequences, like future materials scarcity and climate change.

The nature of growth has changed in the most recent decades in the West, it is now mostly around services, like health, entertainment and education, and less on material goods. This has allowed some decoupling between growth and energy. Countries just behind on the development curve, following the liberal creed, are still catching up on equipment, be it infrastructure, housing or appliances, relying on mostly non-renewable material resources that have to be transformed with the help of mostly non-renewable energy: material resources, energy, at the heart of our worries about a not sustainable future.

The debate is raging between optimists, supporters of technology-driven green growth, and pessimists, staunch believers of collapse or de-growth, adepts of a slow(er) life. No one can know the future, so the jury will remain out with regard to who has the right strategy for humanity to survive, mostly unscathed.

My own worry about green growth, my favorite strategy as an engineer and an optimist, revolves around the availability of intellectual resources to innovate, specifically toward the material world to make it more sustainable.

The financial planet is not short of money. Stock exchanges break records in an era of low interest rates and business angels are a-plenty. But where is venture capital going? As 2021 closed, reviews of the past year abound and the review of French Tech fund raising, more than 10 G€ in 2021, caught my attention. In the Top Ten, over 100 M€ each, nine of them dealt with crypto-currencies, virtual bank and insurance, internet-based marketplaces, games and real estate, and only one with electronic appliances re-conditioning, the closest to the material world.

Although this may seem in line with growth around services, for ourselves in the West, are these the key priorities of innovation for the planet? Shouldn’t we concentrate on subjects like wood-based concrete, building and housing energy efficiency, material recycling – targets that have been identified to make construction and public works more sustainable in a 2050 Zero Net Emission world? Or, even more urgent, on sustainable infrastructure for energy or transport in developing countries?

It is not enough to rely on green or responsible finance, you need the scientific minds to address these fields of research, development and deployment. Again, using France as an example, it is striking to notice that nearly half of the graduates of the top engineering schools, heirs to 19th century Gustave Eiffel or to the designers of the nuclear energy-based electricity production in the seventies, end up in finance and consulting. Even more striking, that business school students have been multiplied by twenty in sixty years, that only one out of ten university student selects physics or biology, when nine go to psychology, language or law.

No surprise innovation comes from China and India, where engineering is still a leading academic cursus. But can we afford to delegate overseas, as we did for oil, but not by choice, just because of geography, future innovation regarding our material environment? With a huge risk to become dependent in the future on foreign, not necessarily friendly, powers to supply our comfort, assuming all of us do not live in a metaverse or Matrix-type virtual world?

As parents and grandparents, as professionals with arguments to teach and convince, we have a duty to direct our young ones back to engineering and science education, in large numbers, as our material well-being could well be at stake.

Philippe Marchand is a Bioenergy Steering Committee Member of the European Technology and Innovation Platform (ETIP).