I keep wanting to write about global warming but I also abhor the concept of trying to make the great intellectually unwashed understand that it’s real. I mean how do you write stuff to people who don’t read?
So I decided to ignore global warming and speak to poisoning the planet. This is something they can all understand, something they can sink their teeth into. This is war. Things will get killed. This is good.
The only problem with that is that telling the nay-sayers that ten thousand people are killed very year in this country by each of coal, oil or gas emissions will only depress them and they will go off and hide in the outhouse or just tell us that it’s not true because God says it isn’t in the bible.
So rather than get into that unending fight I’ve decided to take a whole new tack. We shouldn’t be going green the way we are. We should be concentrating, at least in this country, on developing the next green technology. There are multiple reasons for this.
We are a northern country. Right now the solar panels that are available on the market are really only financially and environmentally efficient for southern countries, countries that have much more sun than we do. Of course if we continue to ignore that thing (global warming) that doesn’t exist, we will soon have the right climate for the solar panels that we now consider inefficient. See, there’s a good side to everything.
Let’s look at Germany a very efficient country but in the northern hemisphere. They have recently spent $800M on solar technology that is only 10% efficient for their climate. Why? Well because they figured that 10% efficiency was better than 0% efficiency but that’s not necessarily true. What they should be doing is dumping all their $800M into research with the goal of developing a technology that will be 90% efficient in their climate.
I heard a very good analogy about this on Fareed Zakaria’s show recently but I can’t remember it so I’ll give you one that happened to me.
In 1966 I designed a three room psychedelic house for the Fender Bass Company that was used at the NMMA convention in Chicago. The walls & floors of the house moved by means of hydraulics to the beat of whatever music was playing through our sound system and the whole thing, music and hydraulics were run by a computer.
The computer, which we trucked from NY to Chicago, fitted snugly on the bed of a 40 foot eighteen wheeler. Today you could do the same job with your Iphone.
If the goal in the 1960’s had been to provide a computer for every person in the country we would now be a country where everyone has a computer but they can only do about 3% of what our current computers can do and we would not have the computer technology we have today. What they did do, the scientists and the government at that time, was to spend all the money on computer research and development. Most of that money was spent, by the way, on military and space technology. The results of that R&D was picked up by industry and developed into the computer world we live in today. R&D leads to technology. Technology leads to products. The manufacture of products leads to jobs. R&D leads to all of this. It was true in the ‘60s, it’s true now.
What we should be doing now, is allocating every dollar we can scrape together to research and development on products and technologies that will create the answer to global warming, or climate change or just clean air and water. That research will lead to new products, which will need to be manufactured, which will create jobs that will pay money, which can be used to purchase products that people without those jobs cannot buy, thereby enabling industry to sell products to consumers and have the profits to invest in new plant and create even more jobs. The result will be twofold. We will inch out of our current unemployment problems and we will possibly create a world that will be worth living in.
Right now, even though it has been our ingenuity that has created most computer and environmental technology, it has been spirited away by emerging nations like China & India because of their lower wages. But that’s okay. That will always happen in a world of unbalanced economies. It is our job to keep innovating so that we can stay ahead of the curve. So that we can create new industries and suck the honey out of each new technology before a country with cheaper labor takes it over to eat the crumbs.
Right now we should be spending billions on hydroponic, solar and wind technology. Yes, we already have stuff out there working but we are wasting time and money producing highly inefficient technologies like ethanol, which are at best transitional when we should be leapfrogging over them, and concentrating on the final goal. Every minute and penny spent on transitional technologies takes away from the ultimate and timely solution to the problem and make no mistake about it, if we don’t find a solution soon, we won’t be around to find one at all.