Ancient inventions offer hope

COP 28, the UN meeting or conference on climate change, ended last week after a lot of haggling between the 196 signatory countries to the 2015 Paris Agreement.

It is not easy to achieve a joint undertaking on how to slow down the ruination of planet Earth when there are so many competing interests.

Each annual meeting is more querulous as the stakes get higher. So high, in fact, that the United Arab Emirates – one of the world's top ten oil producers that is in the same fast lane as the rest of the Arabian peninsula to overdevelop their economics at any cost before they have to transition principally to other energy sources – hosted this year’s meeting in Dubai.

Was it a bold attempt at a mirage that the Gulf states and their allies tried to convince everyone that they have all our interests at heart?

Happily, it did not quite go their way. The original wishy-washy draft text was rejected by countries for which an increase over 1.5C in global temperature is a “death sentence,” as Bajan PM Mia Mottley named it.

In the end, the deal struck was a huge compromise, especially since we are already exceeding the 1.5C crisis point and know perfectly well what to expect as a result. Commentators point out that countries promising to “transition away from fossil fuels in energy systems” – with no time schedule and no consequence for not doing so – was a leap in the right direction, since such a notion was not even utterable at COP last year.

Maybe so, but it falls short of the bolder undertaking to “phase out” fossil fuels. If it is progress, it is too slow and too half-hearted, so that one remains feeling helpless and at the mercy of the vengeful elements of nature as she responds to our mismanagement of our planetary environment.

Yet there may be solace in thinking how relatively quickly the world changes and in knowing, with some certainty, that eventually drilling for oil and refining fossil fuels and other environmentally-damaging means of mankind's functioning and advancing will become obsolete, or will morph into more advanced, still unimaginable technologies and design systems. It will probably happen so quietly over time that we will hardly notice.

A recent article in the Atlantic reminded me how cockroaches once were as much a bane of our lives as mosquitoes, and we now take it for granted that they no longer are. Sources of energy are not actually comparable but it gives hope that if we seriously marshal our scientific clout to achieve a goal, we can prevail.

I was also encouraged by a new book, Nuts and Bolts, published by Norton and shortlisted for the 2023 Royal Society Science Book Prize. In it, structural engineer Roma Agrawal argues that the nail, the spring, the wheel, the lens, the string, the magnet and the pump are the seven most fundamental inventions, the basic building-blocks of engineering that changed the world and underpin much of modern life.

The list is surprising because we never think about these everyday items, which at any one time were the most valuable of technologies.

For example, in pre-industrial Britain, nails were so precious that exporting them to the colonies was banned. Handmade in Roman times and mainly made by women during the Industrial Revolution, the now common-or-garden nail is critical in the construction of skyscrapers – so insignificant yet so important.

I once knew a man, the son of Indian millionaires, whose wealth derived from manufacturing small widgets used in constructing India’s vast network of train lines. From his description, they sounded like nails.

Surprisingly, the spring is one of the oldest and most important inventions, and so very versatile that it is unremarked. We think a spring is a metal coil, as in a car’s suspension, the foundations of a building or a suspension bridge, a music box or a ballpoint pen, but a spring essentially stores, then releases energy that propels an action. So a bow is a spring which sends an arrow flying.

Fascinatingly, the flexibility and lightness of his soldiers’ bows was a major factor in the military success of the great Mughal leader Genghis Khan.

Pumps are on Agrawal’s list too. I am always amazed by how primitive oil exploration looks, with those large pumps moving up and down in the ground, as if technology had not progressed – so old, yet so enduring.

And Agrawal also includes the wheel, which is ubiquitous. But who is to say that in the future we will need wheels, when people and objects can be beamed anywhere?

If the past is anything to go by, simple scientific and engineering inventions and applications can change the way the world works and lead us to where we want to get to.

We just need to all start thinking more imaginatively. Innovation and reinvention offer us hope.