Energy and Self Reliance
This week has been full of exciting and inspiring energy news. I was first excited to see the 60 Minutes piece on the Bloom Box Bloom Energy Server, they publicly announced their product at a press conference earlier today. Bloom’s solution certainly seems like a viable part of the energy solution and already has major customers lending it credibility. Bloom is exciting and my plan was to write this post on them but then Bill Gates changed my mind.
The solutions wont come from ineffective legislation or meaningless UN conventions, it will come from someone’s garage. We are on our own.
Bill Gates recently spoke at TED 2010, and like his last appearance it was incredibly interesting (although sans mosquitos). His talk revolves around the above equation, making the point that to stop climate change the result of the equation has to be zero. This simple equation creates a painfully clear picture of what has to happen, assuming you can handle basic arithmetic. There is a bigger message in this formula though, and it has been in part illustrated by the setting, and audience of the speech as well as this week’s announcement by Bloom Energy. We no longer live in the time of the Manhattan Project or the Space Race. The days of the government getting together with intellectuals and intrepidly solving the great problems of our day are over. Solutions wont come from ineffective legislation or meaningless UN conventions, it will come from someone’s garage. For various reasons there is nothing the government can really do about any part of the equation. Sure we can regulate consumption or services or energy and pollution, even population has been regulated, but none of these factors can truly be controlled by a government. In fact Gate’s point is that the only truly controllable part of the equation is CO2 per energy unit and this takes a new innovation, something sadly our government nor any other seems capable of spurring.
go to Bloom Energy