Moonshots for Europe

Book by Harald Neidhardt with the faculty of Futur/io Institute printed on rock paper 2019 Co-Author and publisher Marc Buckley futur/io institute Faculty

Marc Buckley

A story from a desirable future — the resilient era

Hamburg, June 12, 2050

I come from the future and have a message for you. Let me tell you about our very desirable futures and the resilient geological epoch in which we live called the Sustainocene (Manahan, 2013). We won the ‘Infinite Game’ (Sinek, 2018) against all finite players who were trying to win at business, win at global politics, win at religion, win at nationalism, win at division, or some other form of a finite game. We realised that we were only competing against ourselves and it was not sustainable — there is a limit to this type of game or growth. Millions of idealists saw a vision of the future that did not exist and committed all their energies to advancing that, and uniting the planet in a common vision. We needed more existential hope and these mindful optimists provided it.They showed humanity that they would provide renewable resources, infrastructure, and security making them feel safe to make the transition to the era of the Sustainocene. They showed us that we are the guardians of the future of life and there is nothing inevitable about life’s future, and we learned that it is much easier to make a difference than we all thought by applying exponential technologies, social impact, innovations for purpose, and Moonshot (Systems Dynamic) Thinking to our daily lives. Let me tell you a brief story about what we’ve undertaken until we came into the era of Sustainocene, when humanity realised that “if we did not change direction we would end up where we were going.” (Per Lao Tzu). I want to show you a way to fulfill the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDG, 2015) and encourage you that shaping desirable futures can really happen. Read my SDG Manifesto and protocol:

Protocol of small but bold steps for desirable futures

1968

The entire environmental and health movement began with innovation and Moonshot Thinking as the NASA Apollo 8 command module and astronaut Bill Anders took the first image of the Earth as it appeared from deep space — known as ‘Earthrise’ on December 24, 1968. Innovation got us to the Moon so we could discover Earth. This all started a long global movement to protect the living conditions of our home through activism, science, innovation, maths, systems thinking, and dynamic modeling. Shortly thereafter in the 1970s, we left the stable goldilocks or garden of Eden state and the safe operating space of our planetary boundaries into one of overshoot beyond the limits of growth.

2015

It took us until the Paris Agreement in 2015 to come together for the first time in our history at the COP21 (Conference of the Parties) in Paris — the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) brought all na- tions into an agreement to keep global temperature rise below 1.5 degrees by 2030.

In the same year, the ALOHAS ECO-Center was born. It was ahead of its time and a true moonshot company in all aspects, using exponential technologies to globally reform the entire food industry. It runs off a systems dynamic business model that addresses all 17 SDGs but ties in 11 of them intensively into the business model and core values. It is a complete off-the-grid infrastructure large enough to support a community of 450,000 people for a full year with basic infrastructural needs but is a large-scale sustainable agriculture, food, and beverage producer. We produce 83 MegaWatts (MW) of renewable energy, store 150 MW of that energy to TESLA Power Pack II and Aquion saltwater batteries, we have a full water management system Clean-in-Pro- cess (CIP) recycling; grey and black water recycling; ambient water harvesting, and rainwater recycling. The multi-level Controlled Environmental Agriculture (CEA) fully automated vertical farming allows for 1000% percent more efficient use of resources, land, and harvests compared to traditional agriculture or greenhouse harvests. There is a three million hectolitre beverage facility, and a 100 million metric ton per year food facility that runs without the use of any sugars, flavours, aromas, preservatives, chemicals, pesticides, or harmful additives. We also don’t have any greenhouse gas emissions and are net positive. Our products are healthy and very good, but it’s not about our products or those products we co-pack and fill for others, but rather it’s about how we produce sustainably with renewable energy and non-finite resources. (ALOHAS, 2015)

2017

On December 12, 2017, the United Nations (UN) adopted the Climate Chain Coalition (CCC) an open global initiative to support collaboration among members and stakeholders to advance blockchain (distributed ledger techno- logy) and related digital solutions (e.g. IoT, big data) to help mobilise climate finance and enhance measurement, reporting, and verification (MRV) to scale climate actions for mitigation and adaptation. (CCC, 2017)

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation commits billions to the furtherance of the SDGs and are lead partners in the open-source, creative commons — ‘Project Everyone’. The world realised that we need to be open-source and transparent and that are better to be unified together in fighting these problems. (Global Citizens, 2018). Adaptation of the goals, and Moonshot Thinking began to grow exponentially. Which was good because our problems had already been growing exponentially for some time.

2018

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) came out with its AR6 report telling us we were way behind our goals on the climate crisis. Transformative system changes in all sectors was required. Limiting warming to 1.5 degrees is not geophysically impossible. Every action matters. Every bit of warming matters. Every year matters. Every choice matters (IPCC, 2018). Even though the SDGs were released in September 2015 we did not begin to understand them until 2018. In essence, they are a people and planet insurance protection plan that would lead us to desirable futures and keep the planet temperature below 1.5 degrees. In January 2018 both the UN and the World Economic Forum (WEF) agreed that the only way to solve a systemic problem is to use systems thinking, dynamic modeling, and transformational mapping. They released publications, website tools and documentation on how everything in our world is an interconnection of systems. Leaving the linear and siloed approach to solving all humanities global grand challenges behind once and for all. The SDGs are also a system and all 17 goals are tied to agri- culture, food, and beverages which are the basic needs of humanity and the human body’s main energy source.

Most of the world was led by misinformation to believe that the coal, gas, oil, and automotive industries were the biggest causes of greenhouse gases and climate change. In 2018 it became clear that the agriculture, food, and beverage industry is the major cause of health issues, suffering, and climate change. The industry was wasting more than 40% of all it produced — this was a 10x or exponential waste, not only are the finite natural resources being wasted: water, energy, land/soil; but also labour, production, marketing, packaging, transport, and much more. Then it was thrown away — which in most cases meant it was buried in a landfill by dirt in its packaging which underwent anaerobic decomposition because of lack of oxygen, and generated methane, which is 84 times more potent at trapping generating heat in the short term than carbon dioxide. Even if this waste was burned or dumped into the water, the long-term results were not much better.

Can you imagine an industry that would throw away 40% of their produce? Businesses saw this aspect of the SDGs implementation as social good, business efficiency, and of huge potential for long-term sustainable business. One-quarter of this thirty percent waste was enough to feed all those starving and hungry in the world.

The Exponential Climate Action Roadmap was published at the Global Climate Action Summit in San Francisco on September 13, 2018. This roadmap outlined the global economic transformation required by 2030 to meet the Paris Agreement. The Exponential Climate Action Roadmap is based on back-casting, meaning that we charted out how emissions need to decline and investigated how fast different solutions need to be implemented to get us there. Emissions reductions were set for each sector of the global economy to follow the Carbon Law of halving each decade from the year 2020. (Exponential Climate Action Roadmap, 2018)

2019

The EAT-Lancet Commission Food Planet Health Report came out showing the world for the first time with scientific consensus on how we can fix our problems through actionable food reform and sustainable food systems. The Commission performed a comprehensive scientific review of knowledge about what constitutes a healthy diet, what is a sustainable food system and how we can provide a healthy and sustainable diet to a growing population. EAT-Lancet Commission hired several of the world’s leading dynamic modellers who provided transformational maps and solid plan which integrated all the SDGs for an exponential systemic impact. (EAT-Lancet, 2019)

The 6,000 plus organisations who committed to the SDGs in 2019 created internal moonshots, applied exponential technologies into new dynamic business models which grew exponentially to stop and reverse global war- ming. Impact innovations that enabled gigaton emission capturing cleaning up greenhouse gas emissions, just as we could clean the air in our homes we cleaned up air pollution globally, restoring the biodiversity of our oceans by removing microplastics, plastics, and the great garbage patches. This brought back balance to life below water, resilient infrastructures with abundant renewable energy became the minimum standard, and the way we produced food no longer had a negative effect on our health or that of our planet.

2030

The world began plugging the SDGs into everything politics, infrastructure, business, and private life as a regenerative dynamic system. The goals have targets and indicators that were reached because everyone could clearly understand how to apply them to their life. We understood that they were derived by using back-casting, dynamic modeling, science, and maths. There was also strong financial investment of 94 trillion USD in sustainable development infrastructure which was reached by 2030 but companies that integrated the SDGs saw much higher sustainable returns, upwards of 12 trillion USD of new business value each year which was 6 trillion higher than the 6 trillion USD requested annually to reach the goals or 10% of global GDP in 2030.

We also realised that by stopping and reversing our direction away from fossil fuels, greenhouse gas emissions, environmental, and health-damaging actions that our planet was still warming because of the emissions, pollution, and trash we had been putting into it for centuries and that it didn’t disappear just because we stopped. This is when exponential technologies, Moonshot Thinking, impact innovations, systems dynamic modeling, drawdown, clean-up, and emission capturing really took off. We innovated using circular economy principles and exponential technologies to make use of all the waste, plastics, and emissions. Peter Diamandis said it best “The world‘s biggest problems are the world‘s biggest business opportunities.” (Diamandis, 2017).

Moonshot Thinking, innovations, and exponential technologies kept us out of dystopian futures and gave us ecologically balanced desirable futures well beyond 2100 to live in complete balance within the safe operating space of our planetary boundaries as unified global citizens.

Reported in the year 25 after the beginning of the Sustainocene

Marc Buckley

Marc Buckley is an Official UN SDG Advocate, Member of the Expert Network for the World Economic Forum for Innovation, Climate Change, Agriculture, Food and Beverages, Marc’s passions lie in social innovation, systems thinking, and dynamic modeling to solve our global grand challenges. As a social serial entrepreneur, he has been involved in many companies as well as several international family businesses: indeed he comes from five generations of Germany’s largest organic farmers and three generations of European hydroponic agronomists.

Marc is also a Visionary for the Global Citizen social movement to end extreme poverty. He is the Germany and Austria Country Coordinator for Al Gore’s Climate Reality Project and an international speaker on the climate crisis. He is delegate at EAT Stockholm Food Forum. Party delegate and speaker at UNFCCC COP events. An ambassador for Future Food Institute.

References

ALOHAS (2015). ALOHAS ECO-Center. Retrieved: http://www.adaptive-nutrition.com (Accessed: 19.12.18) CCC (2017). Climate Chain Coalition. Retrieved: https://www.climatechaincoalition.io (Accessed: 19.12.18) Diamandis, Peter (2017). How To Solve the World’s Biggest Problems. Retrieved: https://www.youtube. com/watch?v=4gfEdpo2NhE (Accessed: 19.12.18) EAT-Lancet (2018). Food Planet Health. Retrieved: https://foodplanethealth.org (Accessed: 19.12.18) Exponential Climate Action Roadmap (2018). Exponential Climate Action Roadmap. Retrieved: https:// exponentialroadmap.org (Accessed: 19.12.18)
Global Citizens (2018). Global Citizens. Retrieved: https://www.globalcitizen.org (Accessed: 19.12.18) IPCC (2018). Retrieved: https://www.ipcc.ch/report/sixth-assessment-report-cycle/ (Accessed: 19.12.18) Manahan, Stanley (2013). Sustainocene: Managing the Anthrosphere for Sustainability in the Anthropocene Epoch. ChemChar SDG (2015). The Global Goals for Sustainable Development. Retrieved: https://www.globalgoals.org (Accessed: 19.12.18)
Sinek, Simon (2018). Retrieved: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tye525dkfi8&feature=youtu.be (Accessed: 18.12.2018)

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