Aweh, Dear Ruminants and Groupies,
The Cheesecake Problem
At a recent dinner, somewhere between the third glass of wine and a heroic attempt at a shared dessert, someone confidently announced that they had “cut out sugar.” This was delivered while absent-mindedly working through what can only be described as a medium-sized cheesecake.
When this small inconsistency was gently pointed out, the response was immediate and sincere: “No, no—added sugar.” The table nodded. The story held. The cheesecake continued to disappear.
And there it is, our species in miniature. We are remarkably adept at holding two incompatible ideas at once, provided one of them allows us to carry on as before. Which brings us, with very little strain, to techno-optimism and its slicker cousin, technowashing.
Techno-optimism is the belief that someone, somewhere, is about to invent a way for everything to stay more or less the same. Just cleaner. Technowashing is what happens when that belief is packaged and sold back to us as progress: real technologies, real projects, but framed in a way that quietly exaggerates what they can actually do.
The Pattern
The pattern is familiar. Take something that genuinely works, say, turning waste cooking oil into fuel and present it with just enough scale and ambition to make it feel like a solution. Never lie outright. Just… don’t dwell on the small print. Don’t mention that there isn’t nearly enough of the stuff to matter at a system level. Don’t emphasise that it only makes financial sense because of subsidies, mandates and green premiums.
And definitely don’t ask what happens when you try to scale it beyond a niche. Instead, you get a neat story: innovation is happening, markets are responding, the transition is underway.
The constraint, quietly skipped over, is land. Not efficiency, land. Because beyond waste feedstocks, you’re talking about hectares, regions, entire countries repurposed to keep planes flying or trucks moving.
You can optimise processes, but you can’t shrink geography. At some point, scale stops being engineering and becomes arithmetic: the land required begins to compete with food and ecosystems. This isn’t a question of innovation. It’s a question of space.
And yet we all nod along, because it’s a very agreeable story.
Avoiding the Hard Conversations
What we’re really doing, of course, is sidestepping the uncomfortable conversations. The ones about cost. About trade-offs. About the possibility that decarbonising large, energy-hungry systems might require real change, less consumption, different behaviour, expensive infrastructure, and choices that don’t fit neatly into a press release. Those are hard sells. Much easier to point at a clever piece of technology and imply that it’s the thin end of a very large wedge.
The Media Amplifier
The media, for their part, often go along for the ride. Not out of malice, but because the nuance is technical, the claims sound plausible, and the narrative is irresistible. “Breakthrough”, “game changer”, “scalable pathway”—these phrases travel well. The caveats don’t. And so, a modest, policy-supported niche quietly becomes a symbol of systemic change.
The Incumbent Play
And then there is the role of the fossil fuel incumbents. Let’s not pretend they are confused. These are organisations built on some of the most sophisticated engineering and economic capability on the planet. They understand scale. They understand energy density. They understand, better than most, just how large the system is that they currently dominate.
This is precisely why the emphasis on small, photogenic solutions can be so effective. You highlight the parts that look like progress, invest just enough to remain credible, and in doing so create a narrative of transition that is highly visible at the margins and largely irrelevant at the centre. It’s not that the technologies are fake; they aren’t. It’s that their prominence is disproportionate to their impact.
The Subsidy Problem
And here is where the money comes in, quietly, politely, and increasingly at odds with the map. The subsidies, mandates and incentives are framed as bridges to scale. But if scale itself requires land footprints measured in entire provinces rather than refineries, then what exactly are we building towards?
Once you move beyond waste feedstocks, this stops being a story about technology and becomes one about territory. You are, quite literally, subsidising the conversion of large pieces of land. Land that must compete with food, ecosystems, and other economic uses. And if that trade-off doesn’t scale politically or physically, then neither does the solution.
There is a growing risk that this is not a bridge to the future, but a well-funded bridge to nowhere. Capital flows into pathways that expand neatly in presentations and awkwardly in reality. Every rand, euro or dollar committed here is one not directed at solutions that scale without repainting the map. In that sense, the cost is not just financial; it is spatial, strategic, and, ultimately, impossible.
The Illusion of Progress
Call it a distraction if you like, but it’s a very specific kind of distraction: one that allows companies to appear aligned with the future while continuing to harvest the present. The messaging leans forward; the system leans back. And because the individual pieces are technically sound, the overall picture remains just plausible enough to avoid serious scrutiny.
None of this means the technologies are useless. Far from it. Many of them are smart, well-engineered, and can work. But they are pieces of a much larger, messier puzzle. When we elevate them into headline solutions, we create an illusion of progress that is smoother, faster, and more comfortable than reality allows. We are, in effect, attempting to run an industrial-scale system on industrial-scale storytelling and boutique-scale input.
The Trick
And that, dearly beloved ruminants, is the trick. Not deception in the crude sense, but something more human: a shared willingness to believe that the future will be solved for us, rather than negotiated, awkwardly, expensively, and in full view of the trade-offs.
Back to the Cheesecake
So, we circle back to the cheesecake. Because in the end, that’s exactly what this is. We’re still eating the thing, enthusiastically, unapologetically, but we’ve become very sophisticated in how we describe it. It’s no longer a dessert; it’s a “transitional nutritional strategy.” The subsidies are the justification, the technology is the garnish, and the narrative is doing most of the metabolic work. And if we can keep insisting it’s only the added sugar that counts, we get to finish the slice and call it restraint.
A Small Confession
And before anyone sharpens a fork in my direction, a small confession. I am not writing this from some elevated perch of rational purity. I am, in fact, the proud owner of a “moderate exercise regime” that consists of climbing a set of stairs twice a week and then celebrating this heroic achievement with something that would trouble a cardiologist. I track my steps, ignore my portions, and refer to the whole arrangement as “balance.” So yes, I recognise the move. We all do it. We just prefer it when the story is good enough to let us keep going.
Yours in sceptical rumination,
Bruce
Ruminant Pink Friday 