Change

As that great avatar of Western civilization, Wayne's World, reminded us, we fear change

Whether technological, cultural, or political, and even though it is inevitable and often predictable, we humans don’t do change well.

In spite of having had years to address a current crisis in air safety, the competing interests of the Federal Communications Commission and The Federal Aviation Administration are at loggerheads over the deployment of 5G, the next evolution in mobile internet. The FAA, aircraft manufacturers, and airlines are lined up against the FCC and the wireless industry. Verizon and AT&T (plus the smaller T-Mobile/Sprint conglomerate) rolled out the latest, fastest iteration of mobile telephony last week, but in a last minute compromise, agreed not to activate the towers closest to airports utilizing ILS (instrument landing systems) as the 5G signal resides in the same part of the spectrum as the aircraft-borne devices that enable all-weather instrument and automated landings.

There are no secrets here, and no surprises. All the parties knew the risks and stakes. According to Barron’s, the government sold the telecom companies $81 billion worth of high-speed 5G spectrum at auction in February 2021. For their part, the FCC says, nothing to see here, and the FAA says, wait just a minute. Obviously, no one wants to spoil a hard-won, remarkable safety record—the last fatal airline crash in the US was in February of 2009—least of all the airlines.

What it comes down to is change and how to manage it.

Take the California Public Utilities Commission and the current dust up between the legacy investor-owned utilities and their powerful unions, and the rooftop solar industry and the thousands of homeowners who took advantage of incentives by purchasing solar collectors for their homes, and the thousands more contemplating doing so now or in the future.

The problem—again, a secret to exactly no one—is that with every rooftop solar installation, the economic health of the utilities takes a hit. Here’s how the sides line up: the state wants to be at 100% renewable energy by 2035, and has made solar a key component in reaching that climate-change neutralizing goal by drastically reducing the greenhouse gasses emitted from coal- and gas-powered plants. (Of the current technologies, only hydro- and nuclear-power generation are carbon-free.)

In addition to tax breaks for installing solar panels, consumers get to sell unused electricity back to the grid at market rates. The program has been so successful that utilities, and the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, the union that represents workers from powerplant operators to pole-climbers, warn the current structure will crumble as more and more homes and businesses leave the grid for what is known as “distributive” power, or, in plain English (man, I hate B-School jargon), power generation that originates very locally, as in house-by-house or, as imagined in the bestseller, The Hydrogen Economy, by Jeremy Rifkin,  neighborhood-by-neighborhood.

It’s a grid in transition and nobody wants their ox to be gored. The proposal that the PUC must decide upon comes from the legacy energy sector. They demand a major curtailment of tax-breaks and buy-back pricing, as well as new fees for solar-powered homes and businesses; ideas that shore up the existing grid and its associated jobs, but threaten California’s attempt to reduce carbon emissions. For their part, the manufacturers and hundreds of contractors believe the proposed rules are a death knell for the solar industry.

As with 5G and aircraft safety, we have to find a way not to destroy the status quo in one fell swoop, while still enabling a better future. We find change so hard to negotiate that we tend to wait until the last minute before dealing with it, often disrupting systems as much as the changes themselves.

The biggest problem is that minds are famously hard to change.

The currently most-viewed-ever movie on Netflix, Don’t Look Up, attempts to shake people out of their complacency. In a parable that substitutes climate-change for a deadly comet, Leonardo DiCaprio, Jennifer Lawrence, and Meryl Streep lead an all-star cast in an on-the-nose social-satire that uses humor, which succeeds where lectures fail. It’s an indictment of the conspiracy theories and political divisiveness fed by modern media.

Astronomers Leo and Jen have discovered said comet on a collision course with Earth.

The Trumpy President, played by Meryl Streep, is much more concerned about her mega-donors than the comet, and continually fires competent people in favor of loyalists like her dumb-as-a-mud-fence son. It’s a Fun House mirror, and the reflection of us is not pretty.

Often, as in the examples above, disaster is foretold and forewarned, and can be averted by timely action. In the movie and in real life, powerful special interests attempt to hold sway; reasonable people and unfolding scientific facts are drowned out by conspiracy theories, cable nitwits and social media that all fear change.

©2022 Jon Sinton