Until recently, it was easy for the average engineer or tech worker to think of environmental issues as somebody else's problem, but the British Treasury's release of the "Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change" draws a bright, shining connection between how we treat our home planet's life support systems and our pocketbooks. With a clear, carefully-documented analysis that only a flat-Earther could ignore, Sir Nicholas Stern, Head of the Government Economic Service, explains that we have a decade or two to get our butts into gear and start cutting our CO2 emissions to near-zero or face disruptions in the global economy that will make America's Great Depression of 1929 look like a decade-long party. The good news is that not only is this scenario avoidable, but the technologies we'll use to avoid global meltdown could reward the folks who embrace them with much larger profits than we saw during the wildest days of the late 1990s telecom boom.
With the potential damage to crops, property, and productive capacity estimated to eventually cost about $85 for every ton of CO2 we emit, it doesn't take an analog engineer (or a even a digital engineer) to figure out that there's a big future in technologies that help keep the carbon we've been burning of late locked up in the coal, oil, and gas where it's been for the past couple of hundred million years. Even today, the carbon trading markets in place throughout Europe and several US states pay producers a premium of between $5 and $30 a ton for delivering CO2-free energy, a premium that will help push solar, wind and biomass technologies up the last part of the growth curve to the point where they can directly compete with fossil-generated electricity.
But if windmills and solar farms are not your thing, you needn't despair. There will be as much money to be made in developing energy-efficient industrial equipment, watt-conscious consumer goods, and technologies to drive tomorrow's fuel-sipping hybrid vehicles as there is on the supply side. In fact, I expect that nearly every equipment industry will have its equivalent of the Green Grid Association, whose goal is to help information technology professionals lower the overall consumption of power in datacenters around the globe. The market pressures created by these organizations will help stimulate a huge demand for new generations of increasingly-efficient electrical products.
The recent competition between AMD and Intel for bragging rights about who has the most energy-efficient processor is only one sign that tomorrow's winners will be those who include the planet's health as part of their bottom line. Other computer companies like VIA Technologies are already cashing in with low-power computing platforms such as their so-called carbon-free processor, which has enough trees planted for every chip that's made to offset the CO2 produced by the operation of the low-power (20 \W) device.
Of course, it's going to take more than green electronics to avert the ugly future that the Stern Report warns us about. Massive reforestation and land improvement programs, innovations in agriculture, and changes in economic policies are also essential ingredients in the recipe for a hopeful future for our grandkids. But many of those issues really are beyond our control, and not really our problem. Thankfully there's going to be enough on our plate that we can actually do something about, and make a darned good living while we're at it.
Comments? Questions? Green technologies you want to share with your fellow readers? Write me at: lgoldberg@green-electronics.com
