If you have not been to a conference/tradeshow then you have no idea how much it is an assault upon the senses when you enter the site. Collision 2019 featured an endless number of temporary theatres with key leaders in government, and technology industries, participating in giving presentations, speeches, or being part of an open panel or in Q&A (questions and answers) sessions. On centre stage we watched entrepreneurs pitch their value proposition to audiences from around the world that included angel and seed capital investors, venture capitalists, bankers, potential customers, and the intellectually curious. Startups were given the opportunity to provide an elevator pitch about nascent products and services while a panel of judges assessed mission, value proposition, and story, picking winners. What an opportunity this represented for so many entrepreneurial go-getters covering a range of key fields.

My purpose being there was to interview a number of people who I felt were movers and shakers both in government, industry, and academia, but because of timing conflicts I struck out for the most part. But I was given the opportunity to speak with Christiana Figueres, who hails from Costa Rica (one of my favourite places on the planet) and who, if you don’t know the name, has served most recently as Executive Secretary of The United Nations Framework Convention On Climate Change, and a large player in the Paris Climate Agreement of 2015.

Why had she come to Collision 2019? Because she saw in technology a portal to addressing climate change. I asked her how so?

She explained that technology is both a contributor to climate change as well as a source for innovation that can help make the greenhouse gas emissions curve turn downward.

First of all, climate technologies are being used around the world to monitor the planet’s health on an unprecedented scale.

Second, technological invention is moving us away from energy derived from burning fossil fuels, to energy from renewable sources.

Third, it is technology solutions that can help us draw down carbon emissions converting greenhouse gases into sources of energy and other useful products.

She talked about the exponential growth in damage from climate change as well as the exponential growth in the solution space derived from technological innovations such as renewable energy, batteries, smart transportation, and other inventions that are mitigating the threat.

She talked about technological growth that cannot just continue for growth’s sake but must be sustainable with both environmental and social purpose. Examples she chose include the rise of corporate self-interest to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. And how cities and financial institutions are becoming similarly focused.

But she pointed out, that in all this good news, it is the pace that is worrisome. We are not moving fast enough to mitigate the worst that atmospheric warming and sea level rise will bring.

When asked about the importance of electric transportation, she cited India’s commitment to convert all of its 2-wheel transportation to electric vehicles and do it over the next three years. But she also pointed out that in India where electricity continues to come from coal-fired powerplants, the impact on carbon emissions would be marginal.

And she noted that carbon emissions produced from tailpipes and smokestacks have health consequences, killing 7 million around the planet annually. She asked isn’t this motive enough to reduce carbon emissions?

I asked her about the environmental challenge to existing inventories of housing and buildings around the planet, pointing out that very little has been designed with carbon emissions and climate change in mind.

How do you retrofit a whole world of homes, factories, and other infrastructure?

And where is government action on modernizing the infrastructure to address the carbon problem and mitigate and adapt to the upcoming challenges we know lie ahead?

Figueres answered with two different scenarios, one focused on industrialized countries, and the other on the Developing World.

She remarked that she couldn’t understand why in the industrialized world there weren’t thousands of entrepreneurs providing rehab and retrofitting services to businesses, buildings, and homes to improve insulation and drive energy efficiencies, and why there weren’t more investments by all levels of government to improve freshwater infrastructure, build greywater systems, and find energy efficiencies. She noted that the pace of city infrastructure modernization remains far too slow to mitigate and adapt to what lies ahead.

In talking about the Developing World, she noted that the challenge remains far different since so much of the industrial and urban infrastructure has yet to be built. The opportunity there is to build infrastructure from the start that is climate change resilient.

Figueres talked about the hundreds of millions to billions who will be added to our world population between now and 2050, as we approach 10 billion on the planet, noting that almost all that growth will happen in Developing World countries. What will that mean in terms of global infrastructure development and projected costs that will be in the tens of trillions of dollars?

The cities where the majority of us live, whether in the Developed or Developing World, will need to be people friendly, not concrete friendly. Cities will need to be community organized, not highway organized. And more of the inventory of homes and buildings will need to be energy self-generating, and not deriving power from grids that are less energy efficient and costly to maintain.

Before our conversation ended, I asked her about the challenge of educating the public to understand their role in addressing the carbon problem. She agreed with me that this is an area where current actions are proving to be woefully deficient.

How many of us have actually read any of the IPCC reports that summarize the science and provide trend analysis on the issue of climate change?

And if we have read it, how many understand the language of these reports?

What is needed is far greater public engagement and picking up of the pace in addressing what the science has overwhelmingly concluded is coming.

Over the next few days I will continue to write about my Collision experience and share with you some of the nascent technology I saw, and the conversations I had. So stay tuned.

Prior to going, I had read a Reuters report dated February 25, 2019, in which the president, Carlos Alvarado, announced an economy-wide plan to decarbonize the entire country by 2050. The initiative is being driven by the First Lady of the country, Claudia Dobles. An urban planner by profession, Dobles wants the focus of Costa Rica’s next green strides to be on transportation.

Having visited Costa Rica over the last four years, and having seen the state of transportation in the country I am convinced Dobles is right. The country can make great strides toward zero emissions if it can make improvements to its transportation infrastructure.

One way would be to wean Costa Ricans from their automobiles. They love their cars with the average age of a vehicle topping 17 years. Everywhere your drive there is traffic and little attention seems to be paid to the rules of the road. When we visited San Jose last year, at times the traffic was as congested as the streets of New York, Chicago, Los Angeles or Toronto during the daily commutes. Only in San Jose, with the majority of vehicles appearing to be pretty old, the fumes from cars, buses, and trucks, created a smoggy haze which we could view when we looked back on the city from a nearby volcanic peak.

As for mass transit, Costa Rica has both a bus and railway network. The latter today operates using diesel locomotives with limited coverage. The last significant railway company suspended operations in 1995.

The road network like the railway is seriously deficient. Stray from the Pan-American Highway and driving turns into a harrowing road adventure. Secondary and tertiary roads go from asphalt-topped, to gravel, to nothing. When we visited four years we traveled to a spectacular waterfall just a few kilometers from Liberia, the capital of Guanacaste province. A road of a mere couple of kilometers took a considerable amount of time to negotiate. It was more a field of boulders interspersed with clay, sand, and gravel. On another trip to the interior of the country just two years ago, our drive took us several hours to cover no more than 10 to 15 kilometers, leaving us exhausted as we attempted to avoid numerous road obstacles large and deep enough to break an axle or puncture a tire.

So not only does Costa Rica have to make infrastructure improvements to both its road and rail networks it also has to get its citizens to give up driving their pollution-spewing clunkers in exchange for electric vehicles (EVs) and mass transit alternatives. It also means building a fast charge network, all of which is an ambitious undertaking for this nation of 5 million people.

The initial amount of money needed to achieve these ambitious plans is pegged at $6.5 billion over the next 11 years according to a March 12, 2019 article in the New York Times. For a Developing World country as small and as poor as Costa Rica, is the plan too ambitious?

Today Costa Rica has weaned itself off the use of fossil fuels for power generation relying heavily on hydroelectric, wind and geothermal power. Solar and power from biomass remain in their infancy. In its efforts to be fully off fossil fuels for electricity the country is First World. Even the most remote and humble Costa Rican homes have electric lighting.

But now comes a much tougher next step. Dobles envisions a new transportation network with a fully electrified rail system, a biking infrastructure, and country-wide fast charge stations on all major roads. It will certainly take more than $6.5 billion to achieve the 2050 goal of being the first zero-carbon nation. And that means the government needs to get a buy-in from Costa Ricans who will be asked to pay higher value-added, property, and income taxes. In a country that is pretty loosey-goosey about enforcing its regulations and collecting taxes owed, and where tax avoidance is commonly practiced by its citizenry, it will mean a behaviour change for the entire nation.

One potential source of funding could come from abroad. Today forest conservancy in Costa Rica is partially funded by wealthy nations and companies who are offsetting their carbon emissions by purchasing carbon credits through the preservation and expansion of the country’s dry and tropical rainforests. But with a land mass no bigger than the state of West Virginia, there is only so much money to be made from afforestation, reforestation, and preservation.

For Dobles, Costa Rica’s First Lady, she hopes to show the world that even a small nation can provide global-sized answers and overcome the negativity and chaos that surrounds the climate change issue and what can be done to mitigate it.