'Taint What You say, It's The Way That You Say it.

Ever had buyer’s remorse?

It’s that feeling you get when the excitement of a new purchase gives way to the sinking realisation that you made the wrong choice.

Like the day after a broker told you about a “hot” stock that’s about to skyrocket, and in the heat of the moment you committed a little too much of your savings.

Or after the shop assistant persuaded you that the LV logo on those shoes made you look so, so classy that it really, really did justify that extra 500 bucks.

You were swayed by the power of narrative.

When Good Narratives Go Bad

People in marketing and sales know all about how to use the power of narrative to influence your purchasing decisions. But when it comes to sustainability and green energy transition, dubious narratives are a serious problem.

Which is why my alarm bells started ringing when I saw this article on Bloomberg Opinion .

It's a good example of how language and narrative structure can confuse instead of clarify.

There are two issues at play here. The first is a factual problem - the headline.

The headline declares that Japan can be “greened” by a one-off spend of 700 million dollars!

This is nonsense, and counts as pretty egregious misinformation. But even so it's not the main point.

The second problem, which is much bigger, IMHO, is a narrative problem that's embedded in the structure of the piece.

Or to be more accurate, it’s a discourse problem.

Allow me to take a quick detour and explore these terms for a moment.

Narrative vs Discourse - What’s The Difference?

Where narrative might be described as a story, a discourse is more of a discussion, an exchange of ideas. In a meaningful discourse the participants will have a broadly similar understanding of the terms and jargon being employed, and of the assumptions that underly the issue at hand. It's this common frame of reference that allows a meaningful meeting of minds.

As an example, imagine trying to have a meaningful conversation about the World Cup if you did not know what a penalty shootout was. Or talking to your kids about music if you had never heard of Taylor Swift or Kendrick. It can't be done. There's no discourse.

This distinction is relevant, as we shall see.

Is Gas Better Than Solar?

Anyway, back to the article referenced above. The piece starts off by talking about Sun Cable, a company that was set up with the wildly ambitious goal of turning Australia's endless sunshine into electricity, and exporting it.

Sun Cable's is a radical, innovative plan, rooted firmly in a discourse about energy transition, cutting edge technology and future paradigms of energy generation, transmission and consumption. It's exactly the kind of blue sky thinking that's necessary if we're to effectively address the energy challenges of the future.

But having raised the subject, the article immediately and summarily dismisses Sun Cable's entire business plan as pointless and unachievable, and we are subtly sidetracked into a completely different discourse that argues an entirely different point.

This new narrative offers two new propositions. The first is that Woodside Energy's Scarborough Shoals development, a fossil fuel operation, is a “green tinged” project.

The second is that Japan’s national energy system is such a mess that it needs to be completely overhauled.

The argument is then made that switching to Australian LNG would not only solve the “hidebound status quo” of Japan's power sector, it would make Japan a green nation! Therefore no need for fancy dreams like Sun Cable.

Bait And Switch

Now look, maybe you agree that LNG does qualify as “green” fuel. And that Japan’s energy sector does, in fact, need to be reconfigured by foreign activist investors. And that doing so will succeed in lowering the country’s overall carbon footprint.

But the point I’m making here is that, even so, you have been led down the garden path through a classic bait-and-switch.

Because all of a sudden we're not talking about green energy at all. We're talking about profits and business and industry reorganisation. We're talking the language of markets and capitalism, a discourse of economic primacy and pragmatism which completely ignores the inspirational blue sky thinking that underpins Sun Cable.

Without knowing it, we're immersed once again in the backward looking, business as usual imperatives of profit-making through fossil fuel. And a proposal which amounts to nothing more than rearranging the deckchairs on the sinking ship of the fossil fuel industry. Instead of doing what we should be doing, which is to use all the resources and tech and creativity at our disposal to imagine and construct long term solutions to our climate problem.

Epilogue

Language matters. The way we construct, interpret, discuss and analyse environmental problems has all kinds of consequences.

John Dryzek, "The Politics Of The Earth

Notes:

Here's the link to the original article: https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2024-08-27/mike-cannon-brookes-could-green-japan-for-700-million?srnd=homepage-asia

If you are interested in the Sun Cable project, here's one of the original founders, Fraser Thompson , explaining the project: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nR-Rj8HGA_E

The image above is Jimmie Lunceford and his orchestra during a performance at The Cotton Club in New York in 1934. Lunceford was the first to record the song "'Taint What You Do (It's The Way That You Do It).https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/7da194f0-0200-0131-8a52-58d385a7b928