Pivotal Changes
and what they mean for our society
Munich, 10 June ’22
Back in late 2019 Jeremy Rifkin’s latest book The Green New Deal was published in German.
I had the good fortune to be at the German presentation of the book by Handelsblatt in Berlin and listen to Mr. Rifkin live for the first time.
I think it’s fair to say that Mr Rifkin has no warm heart for the oil and gas industry, but he has the ears of many of the world’s leaders and therefore if for no other reason, it’s important to understand him and his recommendations. It was not long after this day, that EU head von der Leyen stated “this book is on my nightstand”.
At the same time the oil price was looking “toppish” at 60 USD and in the early days of 2020 we saw the collapse of the oil market and I was thinking was this what Rifkin predicted that we were witnessing already? At the same time a lot of institutional investors decided to leave most of the oil and gas industry and for a time financing of projects got really tough and we saw a collapse in the supplier industries and massive layoffs in the industry in general.
There were all kinds of fast initiatives to get cleaner energy quickly and please don’t get me wrong here, this is all good, but I think we were a bit quick to jump to the conclusion that we could end our dependency on oil and gas overnight. The current situation in Europe didn’t help in either!
One of the major points in Rifkin’s book and my purpose for this short comment is the fact he lays out a road map we need to visit in order for us to fully benefit from his vision on how we could change this dependency and it has to do with “computational power”.
So, what he is urging us to consider is what we need to make everything we do and undertake more streamlined and efficient methods. One example I have used is from my local area in Bavaria, I have a regional train connection to Munich, that is great for me and the little town where I stay when I’m there, this gets me to town in 1 hour, we are never more than 5-12 people on the 6:19 AM. Some get off on the next stop where a lot more people get on. If we analysed the underlying data of all the travellers commuting on this line with the purpose to get to Munich Central, we could most likely come up with better overall solutions on driverless battery driven collector vehicles and then utilize train capacity and staff even better and save much single traffic into the train stations or all the way to Munich.
This will be possible with Quantum computing and mostly likely one of the reasons that most of EU is now investing heavily into all the areas that can benefit from this pivotal development in our society and these technologies will also help us being protected when all this data is collected on us, I hope.
And in the current circumstances one could argue that we have now re-learned what dependency means and what long supply chains means for our overall security and price stability and I’m confident that we will also in this aspect benefit from “zero-cost” energy and a so far unseen computational power and other new technologies linked to these developments. This I think will also provide us with new long term price stability.
I therefor urge you if you haven’t yet read his book or watched him online or live to do this and I also urge you to follow the Quantum technology scene or even better invest with CM-Equity in the Black Quant fund where we will be on the forefront in finding the “unicorns” of the future. Happy reading.
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