A couple of months ago I wrote a post about the boom-stalemate-decay phenomenon and had no idea why it is a fact of life. I went as far as suggesting how to deal with it, even though I could not put my finger on what caused it.
I just might be getting closer as to the reasons why, but still with no solution in sight. My theory is this, when a business, government department etc is started by a keen, vibrant and innovative leadership, success is guaranteed. If the demand for service offered or products sold exceeds supply, the logical step is to expand and meet the demand. Almost everyone is keen to be part of the expansion. You only have to look at Google and the number of wannabes that are constantly trying to get a job with Google.
What tends to happen during expansion is an oversight of recruiting inexperienced personnel, friends and/or family into key positions, which I believe is the start of the problem. “A little leaven leaveneth the whole lump”. These incompetent people get hooked to the money and/or fame and will start recruiting their own kind in order to cover their inadequacies i.e. there is a shift in focus where the workplace gets dominated by backstabbing and endless meetings. The skilled workers get frustrated and many of them leave. This affects productivity and then the restructuring starts, one after the other, with massive injection of capital in the hope of returning to the “good old days”.
And of course once decay sets in, it is unstoppable … sadly it is like someone who is terminally ill. It seems to avoid such, one has to start early and ruthlessly weed out any signs of decay. Failure to do so would result in a mess, which is almost impossible to untangle. The best way sometimes is to trash the whole lot and start anew. The chilling fact is that many government departments and private businesses are caught up in the stalemate-decay phase and no wonder the whole world seems to be moving at a glacial pace in responding to climate change mitigation. It seems nothing short of a catastrophe will push us into action. I wish it would be different.
If there is one thing I have been waiting for in anticipation it’s the arrival of electric cars (EVs) in our effort to curb the rising carbon emissions. But somehow my hopes seem to dwindle by the day as I see car manufacturers dragging their feet to switch to EVs. Most car magazines I read seem to continuously move the launch date of EVs into the future. I wondered for a long while why car manufacturers seem rather uncommitted to move to zero emission vehicles, and at one stage blamed them for not acting quickly enough. Now I’m starting to think that it is probably the uncertainty around the existing electricity generation infrastructure whether it is robust enough to support an EV ecosystem.
Most governments seem noncommittal in policy direction that will see more investment in revamping existing infrastructure, for generation of more electricity to levels that will support an EV transportation ecosystem. It is only those kinds of signals that will bring certainty to car manufacturers.
You might think that governments are doing a lot by offering “cash-for-clunkers”, but that is a stopgap measure that does not go far enough to address the infrastructure needed to support the future mode of transport. So far I have not seen any studies that look at the potential increase in demand on electricity if EVs were to hit the streets, and how that demand would be met with existing infrastructure. Maybe there are studies on this matter and if you know of any please let us all know.
To my opinion, capital expenditure on more electricity generation infrastructure, coupled with subsidies for purchasing EVs, will bring EVs to the showroom. It seems we are back to lack of political will again which seems to be the Achilles heel on our road to low emissions. We need to see some political leadership in power generation and just coming out of this 2007-2009 financial crisis, one would think that huge infrastructural spending (and in our case on generation of more electricity) will be a wise political maneuver; it will not only create more jobs but accelerate us out of this financial quagmire.
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