I got a sneak preview of Scientific American‘s Earth 3.0 special issue on ‘Solutions for Sustainable Progress’. Mostly great stuff, with the exception of one article, that prompted me to write this rebuttal.
In ‘Learning from the Internet’, Robert M. Metcalfe, venture capitalist and Internet pioneer, expands on the dangerous idea that,
I don’t think for a moment that we’re going to conserve our way out of the energy crisis. Internet history shows that prosperity depends on abundant bandwidth. Prosperity (gross domestic product, per capita) is proportional to energy use. We are not going to lower per capita consumptionof energy in the U.S. We are going to enable the rest of the world to be as prosperous by using not less but more energy. We need to make energy cheap, clean and therefore abundant – really abundant, for a really long time.
Sounds familiar? This is the same kind of thinking endorsed in an earlier McKinsey study, and also to a lesser extent, by Al Gore in his Moon Shot Challenge speech.
Makes me mad. The average citizen is already confused enough. The last thing we need is more tenors in green tech and green biz to lull us into thinking that technology will get us out of our mess. Besides, I do not see what climate change has to do with the Internet.
We need to get out of this pervasive either-or thinking. Energy conservation and new energy technologies are not mutually exclusive. Instead, they are meant to work together. One without the other will not work. It’s a matter of simple maths, and of mitigating our risks, in the unlikely event that technology does not deliver on all its promises.
yeah, sure, we are able to make solar and wind turbines (and other renewables like geothermal and tidal…) cover all our needs without any energy efficiency.
This is non-sense, absurd non-sense.
Energy efficiency and conservation are the very basis of our future energy model.
Without them, we won’t be able to bank on renewables and fusion (or fission right now.) and thus get rid of fossil fuels.
As a reminder, I would like to send you back to this article :
http://www.elrst.com/2008/06/10/renewables-arent-perfect-solutions/
and especially at the energy scenarios in 2030 : it is simple, no conservation, no future.
Keep up the good work Marguerite, your blog is always inspiring !
Thanks Edouard for being one more voice of reason in the ongoing false debate around conservation vs. technology.
renewable energy is the way to go
Very good comments, Marguerite. Conservation is required.
You made one comment, though, that’s a bit off… what the internet has to do with climate change.
Google, for instance, keeps all it’s energy use secret, but I read tonight that just one of their server centers (of 24) consumes 50 megawatts of electricity, with an installed capacity of 100, presumably for future expansion.
That’s a log of juice, and electrical use necessary for the internet worldwide is considerable.
But if you read the Metcalf piece, he never argues that conservation should not be pursued. In fact, he argues pretty convincingly for a particular form of conservation that just plain isn’t on most people’s agenda, though it should be: Reducing the distance that energy travels from generation to use.
Your concern about ‘too many tenors’ strikes me as another framing for message discipline. Message discipline can be good. But it can also serve to blind you to alternatives. That’s the real meat of Metcalf’s essay: Here’s what we learned about innovation from the internet, let’s apply those lessons to green tech.
Message discipline can function as a barrier to innovation, too. One of the key lessons Metcalf talks about is that when you set too high a bar or the wrong bar — e.g., don’t even bother to think about nuclear, always think about scaling up instead of scavenging as much energy as you can as close to the source as you can, etc. — you create barriers to innovation. That’s what that essay is really about, yet you focus on one small pragmatic statement near the beginning to damn the whole thing.
… as for what the internet has to do with energy use, check these out:
http://www.smartgridnews.com/
John Robb’s thoughts on Microgrids also provide a good example of how internetworking (which, let’s face it, all uses the Internet these days) applies to power generation and distribution:
http://globalguerrillas.typepad.com/globalguerrillas/2008/04/resilient-commu.html