Thread by @paraschopra

What role does innovation play in building a more sustainable world?

(a short thread)

1/ Solar power is a stellar example of how it’s possible to use innovation to push towards a better world.

The cost of solar power is now competitive to other sources of power.

2/ But why has solar been increasingly successful in replacing coal/fossil fuels but there’s no cost-effective alternatives to plastic bag, or livestock?

3/ That’s because electricity is perhaps the simplest product imaginable - it’s just electrons but plastics is complex polymer.

Manufacturing a complex end product and achieving cost parity over a commodity product is *very* difficult.

4/ We know about plastic pollution, and everyone knows it’s perhaps not sustainable.

But its cost has been driven down over decades of innovation.

The innovation challenge is to create a completely new product but with same functionalities (lightweight, flexible) and cost.

5/ So the question really is - who is going to finance decades worth of cost optimization for the innovative product when the margins are already low for these commodity products (plastics, milk, fish)?

6/ Beyond solar, the only example of innovative product matching the functionality and with lowering cost, is lab-made diamonds.

But that happened because natural diamonds has artificially high margins.

Beyond that, any other such example?

7/ So, in short, the challenge of innovation in replacing functionality of “bad for humanity” products is lesser to do with R&D but more to do with inability to finance cost optimisations.

It’s a tough but to crack.