For a while I've been saying that once we actually get going on doing something about global warming, we'll come up with new ideas that will cascade in the same way as computing did. Trust Bob Metcalfe to be on about the same idea:
The trick, if you want actually to solve Global Warming, is to keep clear the paths of people I'll call "techies" – scientists, engineers, entrepreneurs, and venture capitalists (including me). Techies are the people who just took 30 years to build the Internet and who will take about the same time to solve Global Warming. They will solve Global Warming mostly by developing technologies that deliver cheap and clean energy. And they will do it SOONER if we can keep alarmists and deniers out of their way, and let FOCACA ring.
Viridian Note 00485: Metcalfe on Enertech, by Bruce Sterling, 8 Jan 2007
What's FOCACA? "Freedom of choice among competing alternatives." Metcalfe reminds us that that's what brought us cellphones, Ethernet, and the Internet.
Related to this is that, far from fighting global warming costing a huge amount and adversely affecting the economy, that cascading new green ideas will produce profits. Metcalfe mentions several examples, such as this one of his portfolio companies:
Calling GreenFuel in Cambridge an enertech start-up is NOT a reach. GreenFuel is now working with huge electric power plants in the Arizona desert to scale up its enertech. GreenFuel pipes CO2-laden flue gases through algae slurries circulating in solar bioreactors. GreenFuel algae use photosynthesis in enertech greenhouses to remove greenhouse gases (CO2 and NOx) from the flue gases before release into the atmosphere.
And then, get this, the rapidly thickening algal slurry is harvested several times per day to produce lipids, starches, and proteins for extraction into substantial quantities of, respectively, biodiesel, ethanol, and feed. GreenFuel algae-solar bioreactors do require acreage, water, and electricity, but junk land, dirty water, and single-digit percentages of parasitic power. GreenFuel treats CO2 as a valuable plant food and, rather than try to sequester it expensively, GreenFuel recycles CO2, cleaning the atmosphere while producing cheap and clean energy. That's enertech.
He lists at least three ways the Internet will help: substituting communication for transportation, using collective intelligence, and bringing the same people, processes, and institutions that built the Internet to bear on this new problem. All these have to do with collective action to deal with an aggregate problem.
Bob doesn't like the term green; he'd prefer white or albedo. So yet another group of participants, i.e., the venture capitalists that Metcalfe exemplifies, wants its own framing, like T.P.M. Barnett, the military strategist. The more the merrier, I say, as long as they actually do something. And Metcalfe's crowd has the money to do something.
As usual, I don't agree with everything Bob says (I'm not nearly as big a fan of industrial agriculture as he is), but he's got a pretty good illustration here of how when we just get on with it we can find all sorts of ways to produce cheap and clean energy. Sounds like good risk management to me.
-jsq
Let Bob be Bob, that's my philosophy. Let Bob, Winner of the National Medal for Technology be Bob: that makes even more sense.
Posted by: Bruce Sterling | January 11, 2007 at 05:03 PM
Um, don't we - America, that is - have the worst quality of cell phone service in the world? Not to mention the worst quality of internet access - not of the entire world, but we're way, way behind.
And let's not forget our fantastic health care system, which is by far the most expensive on the planet and still manages to leave out more people than the population of Canada (a lot of them children).
The market - at least as it is practiced here - isn't always doing such a great job with the really big problems.
Hey, I'm all for thinking there's going to be a solution to this, but I would point out that Metcalfe wouldn't be talking about it or even paying attention if it were not for alarmists.
After all, klaxons and alarms really are annoying - that's why they get your attention.
And, speaking of deniers, let's just remember that almost to a man, they are well funded by a very particular industry.
Speaking of capitalism and the way the market works...
Posted by: Azael | January 12, 2007 at 06:42 PM
I do find it refreshing that nowadays Bob's mantra is FOCACA, since back when he was the famous alarmist predicting the imminent demise of the Internet in 1996 his main reason was that it wasn't centrally managed like AOL. I let Bob be Bob when he came to me then by showing him actual data over several years demonstrating Internet latencies improving, not getting worse. He was big enough to admit he was wrong and eat his prediction.
So I think Bob knows the difference between the kind of Internet diversity we had back then and the oligopoly we've got now, since all the big original independent ISPs went belly up or got bought by telcos. What we've got isn't even the kind of oligopoly they've got in Japan, which actually delivers real fast broadband.
What Bob is proposing isn't laissez faire free market capitalism in the Wall Street Journal sense. That's a mass market after crossing the chasm sort of thing, not to mention it never really seems to exist, and it often seems to me that the only real innovator in all of U.S. capitalism is Steve Jobs. Capitalism in that sense isn't about innovation; it's about market share and monopoly. Notice Bob's sneers at how little research is actually done by even the biggest corporations.
Bob is talking about innovation before early adopters. That's more of an MIT-Harvard-BU educational-industrial complex sort of thing. Or an open software sort of thing; see next post about black swans.
-jsq
Posted by: jsqrisk | January 16, 2007 at 01:00 PM
GreenFuel is a bad investment for Bob and Polaris. Industrial algaculture does not work. Capital and O&M costs are too high, revenue is too low...
Posted by: Krassen Dimitrov | March 09, 2007 at 03:01 AM
I think they and the other investors did their homework from before. In terms of not working I suppose you are referring to the DOE study that used algae pond technology. Yes that did not work, and yes it was several decades ago. I think greenfuel has learned the lessons from that study and is making a better system.
Check it out for yourself: http://greenfueltechnologies.blogspot.com
Posted by: Peter Malkin | April 25, 2007 at 10:37 AM
No, they haven't. They just decided that the laws of thermodyanmics are no longer valid...
Posted by: Krassen | December 06, 2008 at 08:08 PM