Don’t You Want Me Baby!

Happy Friday Friends.

All those grammar pedants amongst you will already by now be in freefall at my apparent misuse of an exclamation mark.

Sit down you pedants I say. You’ve jumped the gun. I’m making a statement not asking a question.

The Human League were singing Don’t You Want Me Baby about the end of a once beautiful relationship where a girl who used to work as a waitress in a cocktail bar had decided to move on.

But I’m actually getting on my high horse this week, yes sir, I’m jumping up on my soapbox. It’s not quite a rant but it’s a proper moan up. The challenges involved with providing the technology that will help the planet to reduce the dependence on fossil fuels

Greg Davies from Octopus Energy gives a great talk on the Wired platform entitled “Green Energy Will Be Bigger Than The Internet”. In it, he makes some very good points, not least that there is much less regulation involved in getting a porn channel online than there is to connect a renewable energy plant to the grid.

He’s right on the money of course. This new bright world of renewables is so excessively regulated, by regulators who don’t understand the degree of change that’s needed, they don’t understand the technology or the innovation and it’s not entirely their fault.  After all, what we do is all new isn’t it!

But to be honest, I don’t care. Knock Knock, HELLO regulators, politicians, policymakers, decisionmakers, creators of red tape and captains of bureaucracy.

Hello all you civil servants sat in the endless corridors of the government departments in charge of moving applications, permits and policy changes around and around and around the endless consultation circuits that slow everything and stifle progress. Sometimes it can feel like you’re stuck in a giant maze, not knowing the best way to turn.

Sir Dave is sadly not going to be here forever and St. Greta is only going to become an awful lot angrier, and I make her right. The environmental crisis we face is an emergency and there are solutions that are oven ready, good to go, sticking plasters that are available right now. To an outsider, it might look that regulators don’t want us to solve the global crisis. Don’t you want us baby.

Therefore and vis a vis, I don’t want to be constantly all Erin Brockovich with the slow moving Gov.uk gangs and I’m certainly not saying they should make rash decisions but come on. Everything. Moves. Soooooo. Slowly.

In our game, for example, the Environment Agency are still classifying used vegetable oils as waste, yet HMRC have given it a commodity code. The result? More regulation, more complexity, eyewatering costs, more ways to slow us down instead of getting on with the real job of saving the planet for your grandchildren’s grandchildren.

And…… breathe Michael.

All that said, I don’t want to put people off doing what the team here at Syntech are doing to change the story and help get us to Carbon Net Zero 2050.

The road to Zero is going to be an exciting roadtrip but a difficult one.

So I say to the entrepreneurs, the innovators, the environmentalists the inventors, the technologists, the designers, dreamers, optimists and adventurers. Don’t let any bit of what I said put you off, because you can make a difference.

Do what others say you can’t, find the pathway, be different, don’t ask why- ask how, march onwards, be open minded to every possibility, be resilient, have the courage to make decisions good or bad, don’t be afraid to fail- it’s how you will learn, never stop learning and never lose the fight in your belly nor the passion in your heart or the smile on your face.

And most of all, remember to enjoy the journey, sometimes it can be better than the destination.

Thanks for reading, Have a beautiful bank holiday weekend.

Mike.

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