Bold Goals, Bold Actions For Deploying A Global Bioeconomy: 
New Digest initiatives announced

This past spring on the ABLC stage, a parade of senior US government officials — led by Arati Prabhakar, Science Advisor to the President, and including representatives from USDA, DOE, Defense, Commerce, the National Institute of Health and the National Science Foundation — unveiled the Biden Administration’s Bold Goals for the deployment of the bioeconomy at scale. Meanwhile, a host of nations and corporations have set bold Net Zero goals for anywhere from 2030 through 2050. More on the Bold Goals here.

Yes, there has been deployment already. Yet, not fast enough to meet the Bold Goals set by government and corporations — not nearly fast enough. Owing to scientific consensus on the impacts and timing of climate change, we do not have the luxury of waiting for a bioeconomy to self-organize. A coordinated, global effort is needed, now.

The Bold Goals Actions Group and the Bold Goals Leadership Forum

Starting today, the Digest is unveiling the first in a series of ground-up, global initiatives to help spark and synchronize a faster pace of bioeconomy development. You can learn more or raise your hand to get involved, here.

Our first initiative is a series of meet-ups to begin the task of organizing the volunteers that will bridge the timeline gap between our Bold Goals and the deployment pace we are seeing. I am calling this the Bold Goals Leadership Forum to give it some personality, but our work does not end with a meet-up, it will begin that way.

I’d like to invite you to join me at one of these meet-ups. This work is outside of our usual daily tasks of R&D, project development, finance, policy formation, analysis, communication, regulation and commercial trade — each of those activities are already undertaken, crucial, on-going, but not enough.

The six organizing meet-ups are:

1. The Pullman Hotel at Sydney, conveniently near the airport, 9am-5pm on September 22nd.
2. ABLC Next 2023 on the morning of October 18th, at the Hotel Nikko in San Francisco.
3. Ottawa, at the Scale-Up Summit, stand by for more on date and venue.
4. New Delhi in November, stand by for more on date and venue.
5. ABLC 2024 on the morning of March 13th, at the Mayflower Hotel in Washington DC.
6. Maastricht, May 2024, stand by for more on date and venue.

What do we accomplish at this meeting? I’m glad you asked. Five accomplishments are the aim.

1, We will discover who is a member of the coalition of the willing.
2. We’ll learn something about what our organizations are working on, who we are as people.
3. We will discuss frankly the initiatives and supports already in place, we will map them, and identify gaps, overlaps, conflicts and duplication, and there will some special emphasis on the recent US activity around the Bold Goals.
4. We will set goals for the future, and find volunteers to lead the coordination of efforts.
5. We will socialize these outcomes and next steps with every government, financial, technology or project actor we can find.

If you’d like to participate or learn more

We are forming the leadership right now. I hope you support the effort. Why not you? If you’d like to attend an event support in other ways, or would like to learn more, please click here to sign up and/or learn more — upon receiving your sign-up, I’ll get back to you regarding logistics and more background detail.

I expect that this group will develop standards. Most of the volunteer work in the development of the internet aimed at open standards to ensure interoperability. My phone works with your phone, my website works like your website, and so forth. Standards create speed.

Yes, there are technical standards organization for which organizations such as ASTM or RSB already exist and do their work well. Yet, standards are urgently needed that measure techno-economic feasibility, carbon performance and feedstock availability so that finance can flow more freely to the projects of greatest impact — we need to connect technologies to ESG capital without the superhuman effort that the financial community has to undertake with every project right now.

About those Moonshots

When we consider the timelines and hurdles for project finance and industrial deployment, all of these Bold Goals tell us that the hour for deployment begins now, and that the era of advanced bioeconomy R&D is over — just as the Era of Internet R&D ended in 1991 with the High Performance Computing Act of 1991, the development of the Mosaic web browser and the creation of high-speed fiber optic computer networks that have reshaped the way we live.

At this point in a conversation about bioeconomy deployment, someone pipes up with a comparison to the Apollo moonshots and asks for government to set up a Bio-NASA and bill the American taxpayer.  I know how many have used the Moonshot (or Earthshot) imagery, but I find the comparison unhelpful. It is not a moonshot, a government demonstration of technology. A better comparison is to the development and deployment of the internet. 

Former Vice President Gore reflected on that effort, thus: “That’s how it has worked in America. Government has supplied the initial flicker—and individuals and companies have provided the creativity and innovation that kindled that spark into a blaze of progress and productivity that’s the envy of the world.”

So, yes, government has a role as an accelerator, and did in the internet development years, too. As Netscape co-founder Marc Andreessen reflected “If it had been left to private industry, it wouldn’t have happened … at least, not until years later.” So, yes, the internet was sparked by goals and funding from the top down, but it was built by a vast, volunteer effort from the ground up. 

Many of the breakthroughs of the Internet era that redefined our non-physical economy were about individual or consortia-oriented entrepreneurial efforts that were not synchronized in any way — but synchronization, open standards, and private initiatives played, and continue to play, an enormous role. Linux operating systems, Apache servers, MySQL databases, the PHP programming language, the WordPress content management system, the 802.11 wireless specification, the 4G and 5G broadband cellular networks — these are just a handful of technology initiatives which are based on broad, international, ground-up coordination, and without them, almost nothing of what you experience as “the web” or “the internet” or “the mobile experience” would you experience today, and perhaps never. The Internet is driven by volunteerism and the principle that “givers gain”.

To give an example, I sat in a room in 1999 with about 50 individuals who took on the problem of creating the information structures so that travelers and suppliers could safely and routinely conduct interoperable e-commerce using the internet. Today, billions of messages are exchanged, using the standards and platforms that were developed, daily between travelers and their suppliers, and between the suppliers themselves. That is what lies beneath the surface of appearances in just one small sector of the digital economy, the modern internet-based travel system that we all enjoy.

It did not self-organize, it was not top-down. It began with a small coalition of the willing that grew over time.

The reason that the bioeconomy is not deploying fast enough is the problem of wishful thinking, if you ask me. The ‘carbon we have’ is not going to become ‘the carbon we need’ all by its onesey, or be delivered by top-down government fiat, or by one or two lucky companies that are supposed to do the work for the joy of levitating the competition. The hour is nigh for a transition from wishful thinking to action, and that means volunteerism, and that means you, and that means work to do.

We need more interoperability, more sharing of deployment knowledge, faster and more reliable due diligence. more connectivity between the parties that are undertaking this industrial lift, better coordination between counterparties to ensure that no effort is wasted. Successful global reinvention is never cheap but always frugal. 

What about these meet-ups?

These meet-ups are voluntary and cost-free. We’ll even unlock the ABLC kitchens and provide refreshments to our hard-working bioeconomistas. My expectation is that we’ll have a group of 30 people or so in Sydney, and a couple of volunteers such as Allan Green of AgRenew, Cameron Begley of Spiegare Consulting, Chris Tindal of CAAFI and Shahana McKenzie and Georgi York of Bioenergy Australia are already working at getting word out and around. Because of the large attendance at ABLC Next and ABLC, we may have slightly larger groups in Washington and San Francisco. The intent is to have a group large enough to accomplish something, but not so large so as to accomplish nothing.

Your friend,
Jim Lane
Editor and Publisher, The Daily Digest