Oil goes to $200/barrel -- an almost certainty in the next 20 years. You don't think that cost constraint will affect the nations that can't afford oil like we can? Maybe they'll be the ones who engineer their way out of this.
This may end up being a cell phone type situation. Because the US was SO wealthy, we were able to wire phones to every house in the US. This wealth made us a late adopter of cell phone technology, because who needed a cell phone when there was a phone in every home and a phone on every corner.
As a result other countries pioneered cell phone technology. We've happily adopted it because it is obviously superior -- but the market brought cell phones to the US when they were finally superior to what the US, with it's enormous wealth could already afford.
The same thing will happen with green technology. China is already the world's leading producer of Solar technology. In fact, our consuming all the oil makes them NEED green technology. When they get it good and ready, we'll happily pay for their pioneering efforts, and move over to a green energy industry that is mature and capable.
We have the wealth to not have to stumble through the green energy growing pains. Other countries don't so they'll HAVE to.
This may end up being a cell phone type situation. Because the US was SO wealthy, we were able to wire phones to every house in the US. This wealth made us a late adopter of cell phone technology, because who needed a cell phone when there was a phone in every home and a phone on every corner.
As a result other countries pioneered cell phone technology. We've happily adopted it because it is obviously superior -- but the market brought cell phones to the US when they were finally superior to what the US, with it's enormous wealth could already afford.
The same thing will happen with green technology. China is already the world's leading producer of Solar technology. In fact, our consuming all the oil makes them NEED green technology. When they get it good and ready, we'll happily pay for their pioneering efforts, and move over to a green energy industry that is mature and capable.
We have the wealth to not have to stumble through the green energy growing pains. Other countries don't so they'll HAVE to.
Comments
when a company is competing against a global competitor the economies of scales may play against them if they've built for a local market that's distorted prices...
that being said companies are generally not great at making long term investments in innovation. toyota has managed to compete and quite well using parallel hybrids while clearly series hybrids are better though series hybrid production is low...
we have a lot of research dollars poured into a bunch of technologies and I don't know how much of that is bearing fruit...I'd like to see us try to implement far cheaper smartgrid as the current ones seem expensive and overpriced...
stephen