World is Green

Robert Cringely is a tech commentator who writes a weekly column called I, Pulpit on PBS. He is considered a maverick for his unusual predictions in the tech industry. Sometimes he is right and a lot of times he is wrong, however, he is entertaining.

Now, Robert is trying to tackle the energy crisis of US and falls flat on his face. It goes on to show that it is better to stick to your knitting than comment on issues which are not within your core area of competence.

Robert believes that the money earmarked for building the National Information Infrastructure in the US ($200 billion) has gone to waste and that the $500 billion spent on the Iraq war was fruitless so he thinks of a better use for that money.

He suggests using $200 billion to buy 10 million Prius and gift it to the owners of the highest driven cars in the US and another $300 billion for increasing Ethanol usage in the US. The rest $200 billion in wiring some 20 million households to work from home. This he believes will cut down the energy consumption by 20% to 30% in the US and will help towards global warming, meeting Kyoto targets, decreasing price of oil and solving some of the US dependence of Middle East oil.

Now, there are many flaws in the argument.

For starters, the $500 billion cost to the US economy is not the entire amount. According to Joseph Stiglitz and Linda Blimes it could cost somewhere around $2 trillion dollars if such costs as lifetime disability and healthcare for troops injured in the conflict as well as the impact on the American economy are included.

Coming to the argument for buying 10 million Prius. First, by providing a free car to the highest using car owners you are only increasing their chances of driving it further rather than changing their behaviour. Like some technologists, Robert thinks that technology is the solution to everything. In fact, rather than penalizing their behaviour you are providing a incentive for bad behaviour.

Second, a Prius is not the solution to our problem. Even though it has the highest mileage of all cars in the US, it is solving only one part of the problem. Cutting down operational use of energy.

For a product like a car you need to look at its entire life cycle. The production, operation and disposal of a car.

What is the ecobalance of a product? Products themselves do not pollute: it is the factories that made them, the trucks that transported them, the user who uses them and the incinerator that burns them.

In this case, the product pollutes too. When replacing with the Prius, there is a need to take care of the 10 million cars disposed of. The decision as Robert suggests is not as simple as sending scrap metal to China after using it to create a new Prius.

With a lot of products, it is not very clear if disposal and substitution creates more or less benefits than using the product. In the waste mantra “Reduce, Reuse, Repair, Recycle,” it is better to reuse than recycle or dispose of products. In that sense, scraping the 10 million cars is a huge waste of natural resources.

Coming to the Ethanol debate. Is it prudent to invest all of $300 billion dollars in one alternative fuel? Is Ethanol a good substitute of gasoline? Is Ethanol from Corn (which is where it comes from in the US) is the best in terms of energy economics? What about the effect of increased ethanol production through corn on land usage and food prices around the world?

As mentioned in a previous post, there is increasingly a choice between food and fuel. As Lester Brown writes,

By the end of 2007, the emerging competition between the 800 million automobile owners who want to maintain their mobility and the world’s 2 billion poorest people who want simply to survive will be on center stage.

The attempt to solve one problem—growing U.S. dependence on imported oil—is creating another far more serious problem. Fortunately this can be avoided. The 3 percent of U.S. automotive fuel supplies now coming from ethanol could be achieved, several times over and at a fraction of the cost, by raising automobile fuel-efficiency standards by 20 percent.

All this and we have debated only on the basis of the first principles. Implementation, government systems, practical production problems are not even tackled yet.

As is evident from this analysis, solving these problems is not simple. I am no expert in this and would surely have missed some more points but suggesting solutions require a greater depth of understanding and a wider thought process including a better understanding of the subject at hand. Robert should better stick to predicting Apple’s products and Vista’s woes.