The Liminal Learning Portal

The United Nations Climate Change Conference, or COP26, is bringing together world leaders to discuss the world’s future action on climate change. At present, the world’s biggest polluters are China, the United States, and India – three enormous countries with large populations and extensive infrastructure built on fossil fuels. In these, and all, countries, it’s often assumed that decarbonization requires painful sacrifices that could damage prosperity. But in reality, it’s the opposite. Greenhouse gas (GHG) mitigation actually offers an unprecedented opportunity for new forms of economic prosperity that regenerate the earth. This is not just an opportunity that every country

Photo by Zdeněk Macháček on Unsplash Many scientists now believe that the Amazon is close to a tipping point, after which it would become a savanna rather than a rainforest. Instead of pulling greenhouse gases out of the atmosphere, it will start pumping them into the atmosphere, leading so-called flying rivers – bands of moisture in the air that bring rainfall to the continent – to dry up. “As many as 10,000 species may be at risk of dying off,” reported Bloomberg. By 2018, as much as 17% of the Amazon rainforest had already been destroyed. According to Time magazine,

Decarbonizing the global economy at first glance looks like an overwhelming task, given that greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions come from everywhere – every product, technology, industry, service, and sub-sector. But at RethinkX, based on our insights into the interface between societal change and technology disruptions, we have found that this challenge can be met rapidly and effectively with a focused approach. That’s because the bulk of emissions – over 90% – can actually be grouped around 3 major sectors: energy, food, and transportation. This insight is crucial: it means that rather than a ‘whack-a-mole’ or ‘all of the above’ strategy

As our world leaders prepare to gather at the UN climate conference (COP26) this fall to discuss future action on climate change, there is one major question on the table. Will we as a global society come together to take control of the situation and prevent catastrophic climate change, or are we too far gone? At RethinkX, we believe the former. The report presents three scenarios for how societal choices would determine future pathways for global carbon emissions: the Core Disruption Scenario (‘Be Sensible’), the Accelerated Disruption Scenario (‘Get Serious’), and the Delayed Disruption Scenario (‘Get Stuck’). This blog presents

North Atlantic right whales face an increasing risk of extinction due to climate change. According to a new study by scientists at Cornell University, warming oceans have driven the critically endangered North Atlantic right whale population from its traditional and protected habitat in the Gulf of Maine into cooler waters of the Gulf of St. Lawrence, where they have been exposed to more lethal ship strikes, disastrous commercial fishing entanglements and greatly reduced calving rates. The study in the journal Oceanography, warns that if this continues the right whale populations will decline and potentially become extinct in coming decades. The

Public perception can be a fickle thing. Behaviours, products, practices and technologies go in and out of favour all the time, and over the years, the morals and values of the majority change. Social acceptance of homosexuality, women voting, or racial integration was once deemed unimaginable but is now ubiquitous – a social license was granted. On the flip side, some practices that were once perfectly reasonable like smoking indoors, drinking alcohol while driving or allowing dogs to poop in the middle of the sidewalk now seem shocking, ridiculous and are no longer socially acceptable – the social license was

How do chocolate goodies keep their sheen and creamy texture, even while sitting on store shelves? Increasingly, the answer is palm oil (and palm kernel oil), the world’s most widely consumed vegetable oil[1]. In our report Rethinking Food and Agriculture 2020-2030, we discuss how precision fermentation (PF) is rapidly improving in cost and capabilities so that it could be used to make any protein at speed and scale. But PF is not just about protein, in fact a wide variety of molecules can be made via PF, including those found in palm oil. Store-bought chocolate cream balls, which the author

At the heart of our work at RethinkX are cost curves. They are much more than a visual tool for understanding the exponential fall in costs, they are a roadmap to explaining how disruption happens. In the case of precision fermentation (PF), each step down the cost curve has opened up the cost competitiveness for new sets of products, from pharmaceuticals (like insulin[1]), enzymes, flavors and fragrances, to cosmetics, materials, food, and all in-between. We talk about some of these products and companies in our blog “Precision fermentation is nothing new and it’s here to stay”. Today, the cost of

There is a major disruption coming to the food system, one that is well detailed in our report Rethinking Food and Agriculture. In the report, we identify the core disruptive technology over the next 10 years to be precision fermentation (PF). The regulation of PF is key to shaping the disruption. Regulation and the food system go hand in hand, and rightfully so. Food has a direct relationship with public and personal health, and people must be protected from real threats to safety and any uncertainties with the ingredients in the food they eat, or how those foods are produced.

Today, we are on the cusp of multiple disruptions in food and  materials. So why now? In a previous blog we discussed how precision fermentation (PF) has been around for 40 years. We know this because we can pinpoint the first product commercialized from PF – human insulin. Human insulin is an illustrative example of how PF created a superior product that led to a rapid disruption of an incumbent product. In this blog, we discuss some of the technology convergence that led to scientists being able to produce human insulin via PF, as well as some of the economic