109. Occam's Razor or No Silver Bullets?

“Software is Feeding the World” is a weekly newsletter for Food/AgTech leaders about technology trends.

Programming note: The newsletter will be off next week for the 4th of July holiday in the US (US Independence Day)

Greetings from the Greek archipelago and welcome back to another edition of the newsletter after a two week gap!

I spent the first two weeks of June traveling in India. I had the privilege to travel to Mumbai (financial capital of India), Vadodara (cultural center on the west coast and my home town), Rajpipla (a small town near the famous, controversial, and second largest concrete dam in the world), Ahmedabad (large and growing city in the west) and Kolkata on the east coast (former capital of the British Raj in India).

During my travels in India, Ag and AgTech was definitely not on my mind, though the unreasonably hot summer reminded me of the dangers of climate change, and its impact on the global south.

For example, April 2022 was the 3rd hottest April in the last 122 years in India (since record keeping started). The temperatures in places I visited in June were regularly touching 40 C (or 105 F). With monsoon on the horizon, the humidity levels in coastal cities like Mumbai and Kolkata was off the charts.

The uncertain power grid situation, combined with energy issues with the war in Ukraine, is pushing the weak infrastructure in India to the limits.

Heat and humidity in India

Only 12% of India’s population has access to air-conditioning. Air conditioning is a luxury few can afford. You always have to pay extra for the comfort of air-conditioning. Restaurants will loudly advertise air-conditioning. Cabs will charge you extra to turn on air conditioning.

For example, my fare from the Kolkata airport to my destination was Rs. 450 (about US $ 6), but the taxi driver wanted me to pay an extra Rs 150 (about US $ 2) to turn on the air-conditioning. I had to pay a premium of 33% to get access to air conditioning in the car, to account for higher fuel usage, if the car operates its AC unit.

It reminded me of some of the fictitious events described in India in Kim Stanley Robinson’s novel, The Ministry for the Future, which includes dramatic scenes in the near future in northern India. People in the novel are trying to escape the excess heat, and humidity, without access to air conditioning or fans due to shortage of power.

There were many, many people in the lake, heads dotted the surface everywhere around the shores, and out where it was presumably deeper there were still heads, people semi-submerged as they lay on impromptu rafts of one sort or another. But not all of these people were alive. The surface of the lake seemed to have a low miasma rising out of it, and now the stink of death, of rotting meat, could be discerned in one’s torched nostrils.

The scenario painted above is morbid, and scary, and seems improbable (though not impossible).

For example, even in the near term, the ILO has estimated a loss of 34 million jobs in India due to heat by 2030.

The International Labour Organization (ILO) has warned of the impact of the rising heat. ILO's 2019 report titled Working on a Warmer Planet - The Impact of Heat Stress on Labour Productivity and Decent Work, warns that India is expected to lose 5.8 percent of working hours in 2030 due to heat stress. Because of its large population, India, in absolute terms, is expected to lose the equivalent of 34 million full-time jobs in 2030 due to heat stress.

Agriculture workers work in the field all day long, and the heat and humidity takes a heavy toll on their health and productivity. Climate change is already having and will have a direct and significant impact on human and agronomic productivity.

So what are some of the potential solutions to mitigate climate change?

What role will food and agriculture systems play (or can play)?

How should resource-strapped countries think about this, especially in an era of high inflation, and high energy prices?

How should we frame problems and potential solutions?

Occam’s razor or No silver bullets?

(Occam's razor: a scientific and philosophical rule that entities should not be multiplied unnecessarily which is interpreted as requiring that the simplest of competing theories be preferred to the more complex or that explanations of unknown phenomena be sought first in terms of known quantities)

Dr. Jonathan Foley, Executive Director of Project Drawdown, believes we have an array of solutions available TODAY, which can help mitigate climate change.

We can do simple things — like dramatically improving energy efficiency and replacing coal and natural gas with affordable renewables — today. This “Soft Energy Path” has been around since the 1970s, but somehow we still resist parts of it, especially the call for big efficiency gains.

Or we could dream about high-tech energy sources. For example, we have heard about the promise of nuclear fusion and advanced fission reactors for decades. Yet, after spending billions of dollars, they never seem to arrive. (The joke is: “Fusion! It’s twenty years away, and always will be.”)

Or we hear about adding carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) technologies to fossil fuel power plants, which used to be pitched under the banner of “Clean Coal”. Yet those never materialized either.

We can largely address the environmental impacts of the food system today by protecting tropical rainforests, addressing food waste (since ~30–40% of food on the planet is wasted), trimming back the meat consumption of richer countries to healthier and more sustainable levels, and embracing the best ideas of agroecology and regenerative agriculture.

He summarizes the currently available solutions as follows.

Protect nature. Waste less. Shift to healthier diets. Farm better. These solutions are simple, effective, and available today.

I do agree with Dr. Foley. Many potential solutions are effective, and available today, but I disagree with the simple label. They might be simpler than an automated robot operating efficiently in the field to perform some farming activity, but they are still very hard to do, from a policy, economics, social, and technology perspective. We definitely need to try harder to make it easier to get the benefits of some of these near term solutions.

For example, how do you get people to reduce meat consumption in developed countries? We cannot and should not enforce dietary habits.

Will this be achieved by education and media campaigns, coupled with some policy changes? What about a large population in developing countries, who are becoming first time meat eaters, as they move up the economic value chain?

Reducing food waste is another tough problem to solve, with an uncertain timeline to meaningful reductions. The problem of food waste is upstream in developing countries, with lack of storage and processing facilities, and an effective cold chain. Fundamentally the food waste problem is an infrastructure problem in developing countries. These problems are hard due to lack of funds, and political will (which can be solved through investment and aid). Food waste is a downstream problem in developed countries, and requires changes in human behavior, buying, and consumption habits at a large scale.

The embrace of ideas of agroecology and regenerative agriculture is fraught with confusion and lack of trust. There is still a significant portion of the farming population, which is not convinced about the benefits of regenerative agriculture. Depending on the context of the farm, regenerative agriculture can be (or not) profitable over the longer term, with adoption challenges in the interim.

Dr. Foley feels the current investments in technologies like carbon removal could be a distraction, and starve easy and effective projects of investments. He concludes with,

Naturally, we will ultimately need a mix of low-tech, simple solutions and high-tech, complicated ones to address environmental challenges. We shouldn’t automatically exclude either kind of solution.

But we need to ask hard questions about high-tech solutions. Are they practical? Do they help us now, when we need them most? How do they address long-standing issues of equity and justice? Would they help us avert as much damage as simpler, low-tech solutions? Or might they become a fanciful distraction?

These are absolutely critical questions to ask, as climate change, and the role of food and agriculture systems in it, is having and will definitely have a disproportional impact on the have nots vs. the haves.

For example, Dr. Foley writes about carbon removal technologies,

This technology does nothing to address the massive air quality and health impact fossil fuels have on disenfranchised communities today. Today, ~8 million people a year die because of fossil fuel air pollution. Would carbon removal simply allow us to keep burning coal, gas, and oil, with tremendous harm to poor communities, and suck out the carbon dioxide later? Wouldn’t this help perpetuate the enormous inequities and injustices caused by extracting and burning fossil fuels?

The scenario painted by Dr. Foley above will be an issue if the cost of carbon removal is less than the cost of burning fossil fuels, which is highly unlikely to happen.

Would a portfolio approach work better, as investments, and resources align with problems and solutions based on their risk profile, and expertise?

A portfolio approach

A recent report by management consulting firm Bain on funding sustainable agriculture in SouthEast Asia, raised similar points.

Southeast Asia needs $3 trillion in “green investments” to keep global warming within 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels.

But “bias” towards funding “silver bullet” solutions over more immediate fixes in areas such as agriculture may be holding the region back.

The report created a rubric to evaluate different mitigation mechanisms against investment attractiveness, and carbon abatement potential.

Forest conservation, and sustainable farming, come through as high investment attractiveness, and high mitigation potential projects. This result is not surprising. The expected return on investment is potentially high (but debatable) due to the many issues of lack of accurate measurements, and models, issues like additionality, permanence, and potentially moral hazards about incentivizing certain types of behaviors.

What is the right framing?

When it comes to food and agriculture systems, and their role, I have been of the opinion that there are no silver bullets to solve big problems like climate change, or building sustainable food and agriuclture systems. In fact, I have often wondered if I should rename the newsletter to “No Silver Bullets.”

I wrote in edition 39, titled No Silver Bullets, (Dec 2020)

In hindsight, I should have chosen “No Silver Bullets” as the title for the blog and newsletter, and it would have been a better fit. I approached my writing with a belief that tech can solve a huge number of problems in the food and agriculture space. The food value chain is long, complicated, and intertwined. Tech does have a big role to play, but tech is one aspect along with economic, social, cultural, regulatory issues.

Even though I was writing in the context of tech, I believe the same applies to climate change mitigation and the tools used for it.

Dr. Foley raises some interesting questions about the framing of potential solutions. Should we talk about “Occam’s razor” with potential solutions? Do “Occam’s razor” solutions exist?

I have problems with the framing, as I feel we don’t have unfettered access to simple solutions at scale.

On the one hand, Occam’s razor puts people at ease, and gives them the confidence of having the situation under control. But will this framing reduce people’s interest, and desire to work on these solutions, if the prevailing narrative is one of simplicity? Can it create complacency? Will it become harder to attact talent?

Having said that, after reading Dr. Foley’s views, the “No Silver Bullets” framing has some problems too.

“No Silver Bullet” says there is no one solution which can solve the whole problem, and we need a portfolio approach. Twitter users often dunk on solutions, with the critique it would make not make a huge dent in the overall climate change issue. The rejection of individual solutions as not big enough, can make any effort can look insignificant and futile.

Small and big teams (including state actors) with varying levels of ambition can chip away at small or big parts of the the many problems we face today, through a combination of technology, economics, and policy interventions.

What do you think?

So, what do you think?

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About me

My name is Rhishi Pethe. I lead the product management team at Project Mineral (focused on sustainable agriculture). The views expressed in this newsletter are my personal opinions.

Rhishi Pethe