Future Tense The must-have skill for the future: Untangling unintended consequences
Jan 2, 2025
Join Dr. Edward Crawley, MIT's Ford Professor of Engineering, Gavin Maguire, Reuters' Global Energy Transition columnist, and writer Nicola Twilley, as they tackle the intricate web of unintended consequences in our tech-driven world. They explore how cleaner shipping fuels paradoxically heighten climate issues and the complexities of e-waste in the green energy wave. Twilley highlights refrigeration's dual role in diet and waste, while they all advocate for systems thinking to navigate this complexity and forge a sustainable future.
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Unintended Climate Consequence
- Cleaner fuels for ships reduce sulfur emissions, which inadvertently increases ocean temperatures.
- Less sulfur means less sunlight is reflected back, thus worsening climate change.
EV Battery Recycling Challenges
- EV battery recycling is hampered by a lack of standardization in battery design.
- This necessitates manual processing in developing countries, leading to exploitation and environmental hazards.
Complexity vs. Complicatedness
- Modern systems are becoming increasingly complex, exceeding our cognitive capacity to fully understand them.
- This makes it harder to foresee and manage unintended consequences.
