English 4.0
Wie sich heute zeigt, hatte die erste industrielle Revolution nicht nur ihr Gutes. Hat nun die vierte Revolution Lösungen parat, um die negativen Folgen rückgängig zu machen?
Climate change and its challenges
Of the many good things that Switzerland offers the world, the Glacier Express is among the best. This scenic train runs between St Moritz and Zermatt, via Chur, Andermatt and Brig, and happy passengers spend the eight-hour trip enjoying spectacular views of the Alps, which were formed over tens of millions of years. The train is one of the great legacies of the First Industrial Revolution. Back then, locomotives were powered by steam. Heat from burning coal was used to turn water into steam and this steam turned the wheels. The Glacier Express doesn’t use coal or steam today. It’s fully electrified, but it has wheels, as does what the Australian mining corporation Rio Tinto calls the “world’s largest robot”, which happens to be a train. The Pilbara
rail network is a fully autonomous system of 200 trains running through Western Australia on 1,700 kilometres of track controlled from the company’s operations centre in Perth.
These trains transport iron ore from 16 different mines to the four ports in the region. Iron ore is the raw material used to make steel, and it has been said that iron ore is more central to the global economy than any other commodity, except perhaps oil.
“Oil” is a dirty word in many circles today, of course. So is “coal”. The only dirtier word, perhaps, is “plastic”, and the dirtiest plastic of all is the plastic bag, say environmentalists. The plastic shopping bag was designed by an engineer named Sten Gustaf Thulin and was patented in the US in 1965 by his Swedish company, Celloplast. The plastic bag quickly replaced cloth bags across Europe and then conquered the world.
As if to compensate for the “wrongdoing” of Sten Gustaf Thulin, Swedish teen Greta Thunberg has become the face of a
“‘Oil’ and ‘coal’ are dirty words today. Only ‘plastic’ is dirtier”
young generation determined to end the harm being done by fossil fuels and plastic bags. In August last year, she staged a protest outside the Swedish Riksdag (parliament), holding a sign that read “Skolstrejk för klimatet”, or “School strike for the climate”. Her Fridays for Future movement has since gone global and students around the world are taking part in demonstrations to demand action.
What we might soon see will be a fascinating battle between the idealists and the technologists, who believe that the Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR) has the potential to undo much of the harm done by previous industrial revolutions. They point to innovations such as 3D printing, the Internet of Things and 5G networks. These innovations can reduce carbon emissions and manage resources across industrial and agricultural production cycles — from manufacturing to packaging and shipment, from use to reuse. 4IR sensors and networks are also able to offer new insights into how we can reduce the effects of climate change and adapt to its consequences.
The world’s population is predicted to expand, reaching 9.8 billion by 2050 and 11.2 billion by 2100. Does Fridays for Future have a plan to grow food for these billions of people without using fossil fuels? How will it get the food into cities, where most people now live? Horses? The harsh reality is that if fossil fuels were banned, every tree in Africa and Asia would be cut down for fuel for cooking and heating.
Greta, we need to talk about this.
“Can the Fourth Industrial Revolution undo the harm of previous industrial revolutions?”