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by safeignorance
3621 days ago
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Going for C=0 is an impressively ambitious goal. There is one thing I really like about this proposal. Gates believes our future depends upon scientific advances and resulting technological innovation, supported by modest and easy-to-justify infrastructure improvements. This breaks away from demand-side policy-centered approaches, yes. But more importantly -- to me, at least -- it breaks away from an over-reliance on old science. To me, this emphasis on science AND technology -- rather than exclusively technology -- is perhaps an even more significant idea than primarily-supply-side thinking. I think Gates' C=0 goal is probably the locus of this shift in thinking from "force mass deployment of existing technologies using the levers of policy" to "science the shit out of this, then innovate like madmen, and only then enlist public policy when it's truly the only missing piece (see: power grid example from article)". |
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Yes it's a small share of the total, and no I don't believe it's a matter of policy. It's cultural. Whose job do we think it is to "spend within our means" energy-wise? Everyone's? Or is it industry's job to just "make it work" so that we can keep black-boxing power, as we do water.
Example: I was at an airport café this morning and I noticed that the menu was displayed on three big display monitors. They were probably 42-inch screens, all showing the same static image. There were like 6 menu items, all minor variants on a cup of coffee. They were all clearly visible from every possible angle. The same job could have been done undistinguishably well by any single one of them—not to speak of a printed board.
I know, it's an airport for crying out loud. The energy used by those screens is too small to measure. What concerns me is that we (Americans at least) live in a society where someone—I would say thinks this is okay, but really just doesn't think about it at all.
So I completely agree about where our priorities should be, but I think that those levers would be easier to pull if we as a culture had a little more "mechanical sympathy."[0]
[0] http://www.se-radio.net/2014/02/episode-201-martin-thompson-... (Where I first heard of it, anyway.)