Disruption was on the menu again this evening. A couple of Tony Seba’s books are in the stacks back in our London office, waiting to be put into the digester. Among them: Solar Trillions and Clean Disruption (of Energy and Transportation).
Not sure what I expected from this meeting, but we were blown away. Here’s a man who knows how to rise – and bend – the S-curves.
Hadn’t been impressed by the design of his books, but his response was that he wanted them “ugly,” based around basic spreadsheets and cost curves – which speak to bankers and other numbers folk. His approach to business leaders: “It’s going to happen whether you like it or not, with you or without you – and here are the data. Get over it!”
Like Carl Page, Seba spoke of the “capture” of government by incumbent, threatened industries. Governments, though, feel they must “feed the bullfrog.” Corruption, he notes, comes in many forms: “Money changes hands in different ways to protect the status quo.”
A powerful champion of what, many years ago, we dubbed the “future quo”. If we can pull back breakthrough from 2050 to 2030, he says, we can “save 100 million lines.” That said, he doesn’t like the implication in the word ‘breakthrough’ that we are talking about miracles. This is going to be tough, with plenty of downsides – he noted how the Fukushima nuclear disaster had turned the ocean into a “cess pool.”
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