Eco­nom­ic change of­ten takes time to oc­cur.

It has be­come a part of the mod­ern lex­i­con to re­fer to this cur­rent pe­ri­od as the fourth in­dus­tri­al rev­o­lu­tion.

One in which the in­ter­net and the in­ter­net of things in­creas­ing­ly im­pact our lives and where we have seen how dig­i­tal tech­nol­o­gy and dig­i­tal­i­sa­tion al­low coun­tries to make ma­jor leaps in ef­fi­cien­cy and the way in which their economies op­er­ate.

In T&T, the gov­ern­ment has talked about its plans to dig­i­talise gov­ern­ment and to make the pub­lic sec­tor more ef­fi­cient.

There is no doubt that the dig­i­tal­i­sa­tion of our econ­o­my will im­prove our com­pet­i­tive­ness, help in agri­cul­ture pro­duc­tion, al­low our cit­i­zens greater op­por­tu­ni­ties to con­duct their busi­ness from the com­fort of their homes or of­fices, and re­sult in a bet­ter per­form­ing econ­o­my.

T&T must there­fore em­brace this in­dus­tri­al rev­o­lu­tion as we face the her­culean task ahead of trans­form­ing a fail­ing econ­o­my.

There have been sev­er­al events that oc­curred over the last month that may ap­pear to have lit­tle to do with each oth­er but if we con­sid­er them as one we will see that T&T is in a place where we need to un­der­stand that de­ci­sive and fo­cused ac­tion is need­ed since what has passed for man­age­ment of this econ­o­my over the last 10 years has failed to get the de­sired re­sults.

The first was the IMF re­port which pre­dict­ed im­proved eco­nom­ic per­for­mance for T&T in 2021, with the coun­try’s re­al gross do­mes­tic prod­uct ex­pect­ed to grow by 2.1 per cent this year.

Pre­vi­ous­ly the IMF had pre­dict­ed that T&T’s re­al GDP would have grown by 2.6 per cent.

The IMF is al­so pro­ject­ing a stronger re­cov­ery in 2021 and 2022 for the glob­al econ­o­my with growth pro­ject­ed to be six per cent this year.

There has since been a dust-up of sorts be­tween Fi­nance Min­is­ter Colm Im­bert and UWI econ­o­mist Dr Roger Ho­sein about the pro­ject­ed growth fig­ures and the size of the econ­o­my when is­sues of in­fla­tion are fac­tored in.

This is the kind of thing that shows the ex­tent of the chal­lenge we face. The fact is no mat­ter how we look at it, no mat­ter what we say, the T&T econ­o­my has over the last decade per­formed poor­ly, de­clin­ing in eight of the ten years, with two years of anaemic growth.

The re­al­i­ty is when crude prices were high, we wast­ed a lot of our mon­ey spend­ing on trans­fers and sub­si­dies and not enough sav­ing and spend­ing on projects that would have yield­ed a re­turn.

Even when we did spend on cap­i­tal projects there was so much cost-over­run, mis­man­age­ment, and yes cor­rup­tion that those very projects may nev­er make a re­turn for the coun­try. This led to in­creased debt, in­creas­es in re­cur­rent ex­pen­di­ture, and an un­sus­tain­able lev­el of pub­lic spend­ing.

The sec­ond event is the vis­it to Chi­na by US Pres­i­dent Joe Biden’s cli­mate en­voy John Ker­ry who has be­come the high­est-rank­ing of­fi­cial of the new US ad­min­is­tra­tion to vis­it Bei­jing since Biden was sworn in al­most three months ago.

Ker­ry’s trip is be­ing seen in the US as proof that it con­sid­ers cli­mate change a cri­sis that the world has to face to­geth­er and that de­spite the trad­ing of words be­tween the Amer­i­cans and Chi­nese in a re­cent meet­ing in Alas­ka the Amer­i­cans are hop­ing they can get co-op­er­a­tion from Chi­na, the world’s sec­ond-largest emit­ter of glob­al green­house gas­es.

It’s an­oth­er ex­am­ple of the US’s de­ter­mi­na­tion to lead the cli­mate change is­sue.

T&T has to plan for a new en­er­gy world. One in which nat­ur­al gas is the tran­si­tion fu­el to a re­new­able en­er­gy fu­ture.

It is the in­ter­sec­tion of cli­mate change, lead­er­ship and tech­nol­o­gy that is see­ing the cost of re­new­ables sig­nif­i­cant­ly re­duced, where wind, so­lar, ge­ot­her­mal, and hy­dro­elec­tric are tak­ing front and cen­tre and where US cit­i­zens in the en­er­gy sec­tor are be­ing told it is time to re­tool them­selves and pre­pare for new en­er­gy jobs, green en­er­gy jobs. Un­for­tu­nate­ly, these are not dis­cus­sions we are hav­ing here.

With East­er just fin­ished it is per­haps apt to recog­nise that there are some who, like John the Bap­tist, are cry­ing like voic­es in the wilder­ness, if on­ly we will lis­ten.

If Biden’s strat­e­gy is suc­cess­ful it will re­duce, over time, the de­mand for crude oil and even­tu­al­ly nat­ur­al gas. This is sure to then low­er the val­ue of these com­modi­ties sig­nif­i­cant­ly as they be­come less and less im­por­tant to our dai­ly lives.

The time­line that most peo­ple are look­ing at for the tran­si­tion to re­new­able en­er­gy is 2050. This tran­si­tion has al­ready be­gun and while for some 2050 may seem a long time from now, just con­sid­er some­one who is to­day en­ter­ing uni­ver­si­ty will be in their late 40s then.

For T&T the chal­lenge is two-fold. The first is how do we trans­form an econ­o­my that is not on­ly re­liant on the en­er­gy sec­tor but which goes hard at en­sur­ing we reap all the re­wards from the very en­er­gy sec­tor that we are walk­ing away from?

The sec­ond is how do we build a new econ­o­my that is not re­liant on the forex and earn­ings from the en­er­gy sec­tor?

I have said in the past we need to fix the chal­lenges in the en­er­gy sec­tor. We have to do all we can to find, de­vel­op, pro­duce, and earn max­i­mum rev­enue from the en­er­gy sec­tor.

I am aware these are not easy asks but there must be a sense of ur­gency and the ad­di­tion­al rev­enue that we may yet get from the sec­tor must be used to in part pre­pare for the econ­o­my of the fu­ture. That means in­vest­ments in ed­u­ca­tion, train­ing, re­search and in­fra­struc­ture.

An­oth­er im­por­tant de­vel­op­ment is that to­day the Hy­dro­gen Con­gress for Latin Amer­i­ca and the Caribbean is con­tin­u­ing for its sec­ond day. It is the first of its kind and Philip Julien, the son of Prof Ken­neth Julien, is part of one of its pan­els.

Speak­ing at this year’s En­er­gy Cham­ber’s re­new­able en­er­gy con­fer­ence, Julien not­ed that T&T has an es­tab­lished and in­te­grat­ed hy­dro­gen mar­ket that is sup­plied ex­clu­sive­ly by the steam methane re­form­ing of nat­ur­al gas. He said his New­Gen project is cen­tred on the de­vel­op­ment of what it be­lieves will be the world’s first in­dus­tri­al-scale car­bon neu­tral/green hy­dro­gen pro­duc­tion fa­cil­i­ty, which will pro­duce en­er­gy-ef­fi­cient and green hy­dro­gen for the petro­chem­i­cal sec­tor, via the process of wa­ter elec­trol­y­sis.

Julien hopes that his project will lead to green am­mo­nia, which will at­tract a high­er in­ter­na­tion­al price.

It is this kind of in­no­va­tion and in­vest­ment in­to the fu­ture that could help tra­di­tion­al in­dus­tries re­make them­selves. We must look at all the pos­si­bil­i­ties and ideas if we are go­ing to move for­ward as a coun­try and re­move our­selves from the con­tin­ued false premise that be­ing in gov­ern­ment makes us brighter and have more an­swers than oth­ers.

As En­er­gy Min­is­ter Franklin Khan told me in a re­cent in­ter­view, when ne­go­ti­at­ing with the world’s en­er­gy ma­jors, he has had cause to re­mind them that “we too went to uni­ver­si­ty, we too have de­grees.”

I am sure Min­is­ter Khan will al­so tell his col­leagues, on be­half of many in the wider pop­u­la­tion, that we too went to uni­ver­si­ties, we too have ideas, and we too can find so­lu­tions.

Will they lis­ten to any­one but them­selves?