Garra Charrua!

“We didn’t start with climate targets. We started with the problem of cost and reliability. The environment was a positive side effect, not the reason”.

Ramón Mendez Galain said this to Senior Energy Contributor Ken Silverstein during a recent interview, published in Forbes magazine: https://lnkd.in/e5ZB_bAj

It’s a compelling read about how Uruguay tasked physicist Mendez Galain to cut the country’s dependence on imported fossil fuels and create a domestic renewable energy infrastructure.

But the article is full of economic data, jobs figures (50,000 new jobs were created in construction, engineering, and operations) and descriptions of the required regulatory changes.

It isn’t an article on the environment.

Indeed, Silverstein writes: “Instead of making climate the primary focus, policymakers prioritized cost, reliability, and economic benefits; emissions reductions were a valuable bonus.”

That line should be pinned to the wall of every earth imagery company!

Our industry spends far too much time preaching climate and scientific virtues and far too little time talking about the economic and strategic value our technology delivers.

And I know many earth observation people know understand this.

But many potential customers (notably governments) are exhausted by being told they ‘must’ use it to save the planet.

That message is noble, but it doesn’t unlock budgets.

It creates awareness, not action.

The applications that do sell, including defence, insurance, infrastructure, supply-chain intelligence etc., do so because their value propositions – reducing risk, cutting costs, increasing resilience, improving decision-making – are made clear.

Mendez Galain summed it up perfectly when he said: “Climate policies fail when they are disconnected from economics. The transition works when it saves money and creates jobs”.

As an industry, we need to lead with what saves money, creates growth and reduces risk.

We need to let the environmental and scientific benefits be the consequences of adoption not the justifications.

We need to be more Uruguayan.

Garra Charrua!