E126 - Mats Larsson, author of the Blind Guardians of Ignorance

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Welcome back to the Green Element Podcast, where we feature business leaders and innovators transforming their operations to be more environmentally and socially sustainable. I'm your host, Will Richardson, and I can't wait to meet our guest today and help you on your journey of sustainability. Welcome to the Green Element Podcast. Thank you so much for joining us today. Today I'd like to welcome Matt Larson, from the Global Energy Transformation Institute. Thank you so much for coming on the show, Mats.

Thank you. I'm happy to be here.

Brilliant. You are phoning in from Sweden. And could you tell us a bit about, you know, who you are and what it is that you do? Because it's really, really interesting.

Yes, I'm a consultant in sustainable business. And I'm a management consultant, been working a lot with business development for 30 years now. And I've also written a number of books on the big picture, the high-level picture of the transformation to sustainable transport systems, production and distribution systems, and so on. My most recent book was published only a few days ago now, The Blind Guardians of Ignorance: COVID-19, Sustainability, and Our Vulnerable Future, which basically is aimed at telling politicians, decision makers at big companies and so on that it's time to get started. And it describes the magnitude and the complexity of the this transformation, which I believe many people are not aware of.

And I know that mine arrived, thank you very much, a few days ago. What would you say are the key takeaways from this book?

Well, I'd say that there are many companies that are working hard and working successfully to become sustainable. and develop sustainable business models and to launch sustainable products, services, and so on. But the magnitude of the transformation is so big that there is a need for government financing in many areas in order to drive this development forward. And That has been present, that need has been present in previous technology developments, and it's present here as well because the number of customers that are available in early stages of technology development, for example, in e-mobility, in different areas of circular and sustainable business, There are too few customers at present to finance the very large investments that are necessary in order to build this development and drive this development forward on a large scale.

And you mentioned e-mobility. What do you mean by e-mobility?

Electromobility, the transformation of transportation to electric cars and electric trucks. And for example, the British government have announced a 10-point plan to promote sustainability over the next 2 decades. And one of the measures there is to ban petrol and diesel cars by 2030. Which sounds like a very, very good idea, and it is a very, very good idea, but it brings with it the need for preparations that I don't think most people, and perhaps not even Boris Johnson, are aware of. Because in order to drive the entire car fleet of the UK on electricity, there will be a need for about 20 nuclear reactors or the equivalent, of course, in terms of power from wind or solar in order to drive and fuel only the car fleet. And there will be a need for a similar amount of energy in order to fuel the truck fleet. So these changes are of such a large scale And that they are very complex because it is not only a matter of cars, charging posts, and electricity. It is also a matter of distribution of electricity and the control of the power grids and so on that makes this a very complex endeavor indeed and a very challenging, challenging challenging process to drive forward in any country. And now we see that the UK have decided to go forward with this, and we see the similar plans in other countries. So there will be a very, very large demand and very rapidly increasing demand for electric cars, electric trucks, that are still at a very early point in their development and quite expensive compared to existing cars. And yet all Brits are expected to buy electric cars or other renewable fuel cars in only 10 years' time. So preparing for this change Is a very, very— will be a very, very big endeavor.

And I think it's going to happen faster than we anticipate as well. I was chatting to one of the largest van dealerships a couple of days ago, one of the owners, and he was saying that they are expecting on the figures from this year, 10% of their sales to be electric vehicles next year. So if you do the maths, it actually means that by 2025, we will be purely electric within the vans.

In terms of sales.

In terms of sales. And that almost exacerbates what it is that you are talking about. And I agree. And I think one of the other things that I'm quite keen to ask your opinion on is the battery technology and where we mine for batteries, because we know that there are only a few places around the world that we can mine for batteries. How does this— how is this taken into consideration when we talk about e-mobility?

Well, I, I believe that governments, when they make this type of decisions, they don't have a complete picture of all the aspects involved in this transformation. So, they assume that all the issues involved can be solved and they will be solved by the market forces once the decision has been made and the process is set in motion. But it's clear, as you say, that batteries will present a challenge. And Of course, we have the lithium challenge that lithium is by some described as a metal that may become scarce as the demand for electric car batteries will increase. And I don't have the answer to that, but One of the measures that I believe will be necessary for— in order to be able to charge all cars and trucks is to build electric roads, which reduce the need for batteries because cars can be charged and trucks can be charged while driving through tracks in the road, pantographs. have been discussed, but that's only possible for trucks because they are higher. So tracks in the road, and there are different developments in this area tried in different parts of Europe, but the tracks in the road would help to reduce the need for batteries because you can charge along the way. But It would also reduce the need for charging posts. If you consider that every car in the future in this vision of the British government and the vision of other governments will have to be charged or would have to be charged in— at stationary charging posts, it would mean that that along all roads in cities and in all parking spaces where cars are parked during the night and during the day, there would be a need for charging posts. And that would be not only a very big investment, but also a logistics challenge in order to get and to make these— make pavements free for people who walk on them and to keep streets free and to avoid cluttering of city environments by a lot of stationary chargers. So these, as long as we don't have too many electric cars, electric vans, electric trucks. It's not a problem in any way because we have enough electricity. The power grids have enough capacity to distribute it. We have some chargers, and installing new chargers can be managed for the small amount of cars that we have. But if you think about the picture 10, 15 years from now when a very large share of all vehicles may be electric, there will be a need for much more electricity, much more capacity in power grids, smart grid technologies to manage charging so that not all cars and trucks are charged when the owners plug them in in the afternoon. You have a need for— you'll have a need for many more things and of course services like payment services and other services. And to build this entire sector in business and sector in society over only a period of 10 years is a daunting proposition, I think.

Yeah, I think it is. And I agree with you, and I'm not convinced that they've possibly thought it through. I know a number of friends have been talking about this. And so your book is aimed at the senior business leaders and politicians and discussing what we've just been talking about.

Yeah.

Yes. But it's also the subtitle that's The bottom line here is that it's a handbook for change leaders, young and old. It's a handbook for all of us because we can't send this to Boris Johnson and other members of the British Parliament or the EU Parliament and other national leaders and hope that they will read it and start to work along these lines. Analyze and start to drive development in the way I suggest. There has to be, or there have to be many people who learn about these things and learn about the challenges and start to take them seriously on different levels in society in order for these ideas to start to permeate the debate, to start to permeate the thinking that is going on at companies and among citizens, among governments, local governments, regional governments. Everyone needs to be involved in different ways in this development in order for all of these things to happen. And the lead has to be taken of course, by national governments, as national governments have taken the lead in the past in the development of railways, in the development of phone systems, and in the development of space technology in the case of NASA and the United States and other areas. And this is a transformation that's so big And so complex that it has to be in various ways led and also to a large extent financed from a high level by people and by agencies and organizations that have access to the big picture and have an understanding of what's needed.

Interesting. I mean, what's your background? Where— I mean, how do you know this?

Yes, that's— I started to work 30 years ago as a business consultant with business strategy and development issues. And actually, in 1998, together with a colleague, David Lundberg, we wrote one of the early books on e-business strategy, The Transparent Market, which was published in the UK, US by Palgrave Macmillan. And that was one of the big learnings for me, is the predictions we did then, that we said that due to the cost-effectiveness and the accessibility of the internet, all companies will in different ways do business on the internet and use the internet for communication and so on. And at that time, not very many believed what we were saying, but we have seen that it's come true. And we can study now, we can see the process behind it. And we can say that, and I said that 10, 15 years ago when I started this development of my ideas and I started to write books about large-scale transformation of society, transport systems, and production and distribution systems to sustainability. When I started this, I said the same thing as I did back then for the internet, that this transformation will have to go on a large scale and everyone will have to adopt sustainable practices. All companies need to adopt sustainable practices. Citizens need to learn about sustainability and we need to understand how to consume and how to behave, live our lives in sustainable ways so that we can participate and contribute to this development that we are seeing ahead of us. And now, 15 years later, governments are starting to make these decisions, develop 10-point plans like the British government, decide like the EU, government that the EU will be carbon neutral by 2050 and so on, and making all these decisions. And there's suddenly a platform for me to say, hey, in order to do this, we need to realize the magnitude, the complexity of it all, and what the different players in society from citizens to governments to companies, how we all need to contribute to realize this.

And if a business leader came to you or me and said, we're a logistics company, we are looking at transforming our fleets, What should we do? Because you've got hydrogen fuel cell as well, which interestingly hasn't been spoken about huge amounts, and obviously electric. And what sort of advice would you give a company like that? But either lot, and would that advice be different if you're a small company or a large company?

Yes, I presume, I'd say for a large company there's a need to embark on this type of development and find out how they can transform their business on a large scale in order to make it sustainable. It may be to to investigate the opportunities to change their way of transporting their products or transporting their— working together with their logistics operators in order to transfer as much as possible of that cargo to electric trucks, electric transportation opportunities, to investigate the opportunity perhaps to use What we have at a small scale in Sweden at present, but that's growing really rapidly. Bicycle transportation, transport bicycles with substantial capacity for taking about 2 pallets of load.

Yeah, I've got a friend who transports flowers into London on one of those bikes, cargo bikes, and it's the size of a double-decker bus and they come in every single morning.

Yes, and the capacity to transport, the speed they can do transportation in big cities like London or Birmingham or other big cities around the world is quite high. You can transport at higher speeds using a bike than you can by car in a city environment, in many cases at least. So that's a very competitive way of transporting things and they're resource effective as well because bicycles require much less material to build, they require much less electricity to operate and so on. And you can use them driving on bicycle lanes and other other routes that are not available to vans and trucks in the city environments.

Yeah, it's interesting. It's PedalMe that I'm talking about. Ben Knowles is his name. And he did a study and they tracked their bikes and they tracked vans through the City of London. and did different routes. And it was actually— they came out as quicker, more efficient, faster, and cheaper for— and so, I mean, down to the average speed they were going, they were faster, you know, everything. It was— it's phenomenal what actually we can do now with that.

Yes. The company Move by Bike in Malmö did the same type of study and found the same thing. They can go closer to the addresses where they're going to pick up or hand out parcels and so on, which makes them faster. Yeah, it's brilliant. This is only one example of an opportunity that exists to make transportation and business more sustainable, and companies can actually use these opportunities that exist and build on those. But there is also a need for governments and large companies to develop new opportunities, new materials that can replace fossil plastics, for example, and sharing business models instead of business models, the traditional ones where we own the things that we use in almost all cases. So there are many things that can be done at present, but there are also a very large number of new systems and new technologies that need to be developed and to be expanded to be available on a large scale in order for this to be possible to develop So that we all can use sustainable and resilient ways of living our lives.

Yeah, I think we are going to see huge change. And I think one of my takeaways from this conversation has been, let's not get carried away with what change has to be made. Let's work about how we how we change and what's the best way to change.

Yes, and I think also there's a need to develop strategies that focus on the most important areas, like, and the most, say, low-hanging fruit where we can get the best results in a reasonable period of time and at a reasonable investment and costs instead of investing a lot of money and time in pursuing things that have little potential, that are not very promising, or that we can achieve only at a very, very high cost. There will be investments like in electromobility, for example, where we can't avoid doing transforming on a large scale and implementing very large new systems, and these need to be planned. But there are also things that can be done, I believe, on a grassroots level or by small companies and individual initiatives that can be driven at present. From the situation where we are right now.

Yeah, brilliant. And what would be one takeaway that you'd like to have our listeners take away from this conversation, please?

I'd like to say that the challenge is much more complex and we need to make bigger changes than most people expect. So we— and we need to focus our effort in a smaller number of areas, not trying to do a little of everything like at present, basically, but to find the areas where we have the potential to achieve rapid and large-scale change using a reasonable amount of resources. And then also for governments and large companies to make available the resources for the changes that we need, financial and other resources that will be necessary in order for this to go forward.

Brilliant. And we can find out more about you from the book that you've written, and you can buy that in the UK from all major bookstores. Brilliant. And can you buy it online?

Definitely. You can buy it via Amazon or any online book retailer.

Okay, brilliant, brilliant. Thank you very much for being on today. How do we find out more about you other than just buying the book?

Well, I've written books, earlier books, but you can also contact me via email and chat with me. I'm happy to connect with anyone who wants to discuss project opportunities or have ideas for transformation efforts that you can try in your local community.

Brilliant, thank you very much for coming on today. Thanks, Mats.

Thank you, Will. Thank you for having me.

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