According to The Australian Fenner said that climate change is only at its beginning, but is likely to be the cause of our extinction. “We’ll undergo the same fate as the people on Easter Island,” he said. More people means fewer resources, and Fenner predicts “there will be a lot more wars over food.”

When people look at graphs like the one below, the inevitable conclusion is that we are doomed, but someone in 1000AD looking at this type of prediction and the steepness of the curve would have assumed that it would be even worse.

Are We Doomed? It Depends Where You Start

Throughout history technological advances have staved off the end of the world, and enabled the planet to support ever more people with ever increasing standards of living. Thomas Matlhus wouldn’t have believed it possible, but anyone who assumed that computers would remain the size of 1950′s mainframes could not have envisaged the iPhone, and hands up anyone who envisaged Facebook & Twitter even five years ago?

What always happens in the doom laden scenarios is an assumption that the progress of technology is linear. I see it with looking at businesses too, that everything continues in an predictable straight line that at some point crosses an axis that indicates that no further progress can be made (or unless it is a dreaded asymptotic exponential curve but nobody bases anything on those do they?). But that never happens. Faced with climate change, will farmers carry on growing the same stuff that fails year after year until they starve to death? Of course not, you don’t get to be the dominant species without being adaptable.

We saw that with microprocessors the limits imposed by heat dissipation were neatly sidestepped by the introduction of multi core devices, and in the 20th Century saw numerous green revolutions which vastly increased food production and eliminated the starving masses of countries like India.

It might be tough to create Utopia, but I think that technology can and will be used to mitigate the worst effects of human beings. In the meantime, if you want to be a doom monger, at least be witty. Here’s one of my favourites from the late Quentin Crisp.

“I have been to restaurants in Soho whose denizens have crossed social and geographical barriers to reach them.

“In one I have seen a girl sitting amid musical pandemonium with a book open on her knees and her little finger entwined with that of her true love. Of course, she was not really listening, not really reading and not communicating with her friend in any way that required effort or style.

“It would be hard to say whether the jukebox caused the death of human speech, or whether music came to fill an already widening void. But, unless the music is stopped now, the human race, mumbling, snapping its fingers and twitching its hips, will sink back into an amoebic state where it will take a coagulation of hundreds of teenagers to make up a single unit of vital force, which, once formed, will only live on sedatives, consume itself on the terraces of football stadia, and die.”

I spent last weekend in a rather hot Doha (Qatar), surrounded by Emirs, Queens, Princes and Prime Ministers at the World Economic Forums Global Redesign Initiative meeting. It’s an organization I have been involved with for the past six years, through both the Technology Pioneers program and the Global Redesign Initiative.

As the world changes at an ever increasing pace, with new challenges from the financial, technology and natural worlds coming thick and fast, there have been questions over whether international institutions, from the United Nationals to the International Monetary Fund are able to cope.

“Today’s institutions are organized to solve yesterday’s problems” – Mark Malloch Brown, World Economic Forum Global Redesign Meeting, Doha, May 2010

A large part of the change, from the time when most institutions were set up in the aftermath of the second word war has been the explosive growth in communication. When the UN was founded television was only available to a very few people, whereas in 2010 almost five billion people have access to the Internet. The proliferation of Internet enabled devices from iPhones to sensors and the expanding use of social networking such as Twitter and Facebook would have been unimaginable even thirty years ago when the Internet was still an emerging technology.

But technology can present a hazard as well as a risk. While presenting many opportunities that benefit the planet such as raising awareness of global issues and encouraging international cooperation, the Internet can also be used for identity theft and spreading pornography, or even challenging the legitimacy and authority of governments.

With all emerging technologies to date, from the Internet to genetically modified organisms (GMOs), the understanding of the implications by governments and international institutions has lagged way behind the deployment of the technology.

The same is true for the emerging technologies of the 21^st Century. Nanotechnologies, synthetic biology and geoengineering have undoubted potential for good, especially in proactively addressing the issues which will inevitably arise in a world where nine billion people face increasing competition for resources, from food and water to power and natural resources. But equally inevitable is the potential for misuse, from home brew bioterrorism to environmental pollution, and in the case of geoengineering the potential for global disaster even though technologies may have been deployed with the best of intentions.

These emerging technologies, and their inter-linkages with civil society have the potential to shape and reshape our world even more profoundly than the Internet, and the ease of access to information and computing power means that in the 21^st century world changing breakthroughs are as likely to come from the mind of student as from a large multinational corporation.

The reactive nature of institutions is inherent in their nature, and we are proposing the creation of a mechanism to support faster, more fact based decision-making, and to provide the knowledge which would enable a proactive approach to be taken to both the risks and the opportunities arising from 21^st Century emerging technologies.

The full proposal for the Centre for Emerging Technology Intelligence is contained in the WEFs Global Redesign Initiative report, and you can also download a copy here.

I’m happy to say that the idea is receiving increasingly strong support from both Governments and companies who are increasingly realizing that in today’s world, taking a passive and reactive approach to global issues will be always more expensive than developing risk avoidance technologies in advance.

You can see (and hear) more about the WEF Global Redesign Initiative below

The Sir Mark Oliphant Cleantech: Mainstream and at the Edge conference was refreshing for the positive outlook on cleantech rather than the self flagellation that usually goes along with this kind of event. While there were a few graphs showing frightening population statistics, with dire predictions of resource and energy use, they were mostly used to illustrate how a combination of human ingenuity and technology could be used to solve problems. None of the speakers even suggested smashing the corrupt capitalist system as happens so often at green events.

Megatrends

From my perspective, as hopefully a purveyor or at least enabler of technology based sustainability, the advantage of this kind of event is to see what the real drivers are, the market for the technology, and then try to find the science and engineering to solve the problem. This probably explains my rapt attention to talks like Stefan Hajkowicz’s excellent overview of Megatrends (the full report is available here), which looked at the “trends, patterns of economic, social or environmental activity that will change the way people live and the science and technology products they demand.”

I wasn’t too happy about the use of data from a rather flawed WEF risk report which identified nanotechnology as a risk on a par with an asset price collapse, a slowing Chinese economy, oil and gas price spikes, extreme climate change related weather, pandemic, biodiversity loss and terrorism. We seem to keep finding echoes of the grey goo fears of ten years ago in these kind of documents, something for the science communication experts to ponder.

Also fascinating was Ellen Sandell’s talk on her work with the Australian Youth Climate Coalition, a mobilisation of 50,000 young people who just couldn’t wait for Copenhagen, Davos or Canberra to reach an agreement, or for the Friends of the Earth or Greenpeace to stop politicking and decided to get things moving themselves.

So given that we know what to expect, and we have no lack of youthful enthusiasm to push us along, there’s no real excuse not to act.  We should be demanding of our politicians that we develop new technologies not new taxes, and that we use our scientific knowledge of the natural world to make it a better place.

The news gets even better, as many of the speakers mentioned, in that you can make the world a better place and make money.

No worries!

I’m still struck by how much cleantech seems to be focused in a few rather obvious areas, something which effectively prices a lot of technologies out of the market, and the excessive valuations thus generated tend to make it almost impossible to get a return for most investors. Sometimes meeting the problem head on isn’t the best strategy, and it is better to wait until a problem has been cracked and then capitalise on the myriad opportunities that spin out – as with mobile phones you don’t have to invent the device to make money from it.

My focus is more on how nanotechnology, by its nature is more akin to what nature does. As Eric Isaacs mentioned this morning, we are almost at the stage where we can create materials by design, or in his his words ‘we can almost taste it’ – something that opens up a whole new world of sustainable everything.

A preview of my presentation is available here – with the caveat that it works better if you hear me tell the story behind it!

Germany’s Sunfilm which manufactures amorphous silicon modules (a-Si), has today filed for insolvency claiming its business plans have been crippled by Germany’s plans to sharply reduce its solar feed-in tariff by July 1st.

A golden rule is to treat government subsidises as a bonus rather than an income stream, then you can keep the doors open when they evaporate.

Stop that talk of nanobots, this is getting silly!

The UK Ministry of Defence released its latest ‘Global Strategic Trends – Out to 2040‘ study last month, and it’s a good read (even for non spooks) covering everything from terrorism to to climate change and their impact on geopolitics.

The report identifies four key issues, Globalisation, Climate Change, Global Inequality & Innovation which will dominate the next thirty years. The first three are fairly obvious, but I liked the rather rational approach to innovation which seems to put the military at odds with much of the ‘Cleantech industry.’

Innovation and technology will continue to facilitate change. Energy efficient technologies will become available, although a breakthrough in alternative forms of energy that reduces dependency on hydrocarbons is unlikely. The most significant innovations are likely to involve sensors, electro-optics and materials. Application of nano-technologies, whether through materials or devices, will become pervasive and diverse, particularly in synthetic reproduction, novel power sources, and health care. Improvements in health care, for those who can afford it, are likely to significantly enhance longevity and quality of life.

For those interested in how the military see nanotechnologies, there is a specific mention:

Nanotechnology focuses on manipulating matter at the atomic and molecular scale, generally at less than 100 nanometres in size. At this size, and using other scientific disciplines, the characteristics of matter can be changed. This will create new and unique properties with profound and diverse applications. Advances in nanotechnology, at the interdisciplinary frontier where physics, chemistry and biology meet, will be a key enabler of technological advance, involving: new additives and coatings; materials and sensor development; and medical treatments and heath diagnosis. Products will be smaller and more energy efficient. They will be designed and manufactured with atomic precision and less production waste. Out to 2020, defence applications, in convergence with other disciplines, are likely to be predominantly in sensors, electro-optics and materials, including biologically active agents and surface- engineered materials. Additionally, integrated nano-devices will lead to the emergence of small, swarmed and autonomous systems. The application of nanotechnologies, whether through materials or devices, will become pervasive and diverse, particularly in manufacturing (strong lightweight materials for transportation applications), synthetic reproduction, novel power (battery) sources and health care (targeted drug delivery and augmented medical treatments).

Much of it is sensible, but the term ‘synthetic reproduction’ pops up a few times, perhaps a hangover from the old nanobot days when planners envisaged hordes of nanobots devouring enemy tanks?

At Cientifica we have been working with emerging technologies for fifteen years, whether developing field emission displays in the mid 90’s, or advising governments, companies and the World Economic Forum in recent years. Over this period money has been made and lost in everything from medical devices to scientific instrumentation and carbon nanotubes, and this hands-on approach has left us with a wealth of practical experience.

As we approach the end of the first decade of a new millennium, science and technology are advancing faster than ever, with a wide range of new and emerging technologies ready to change the world and take investors for a ride.

As a sane and rational voice in a sea of hype, and one of the few companies whose clients have consistently been on the winning team in technology investment, we present a brief guide to making money out of emerging technologies for governments companies and investors.

While Dubai has led the way for the emergence of the Gulf as a major economic centre, most of my technology work has been done in the neighbouring states, Abu Dhabi, Qatar and Saudi Arabia who, while perhaps being slightly envious of Dubai’s dash to pre eminence in the region with the worlds tallest tower and an indoor ski slope have been taking a more measured approach to development. Most of these countries have been playing the property game too, but also backing this up with major investments in science and technology, and that doesn’t just mean taking stakes in AMD or IBM but making sure that technology fits into the local economy.

The reasons to do this are all the more obvious this week, and in a region with tiny but fast expending populations, ensuring that jobs are created for locals rather than overseas labourers is of increasing importance. It is estimated that Saudi Arabia has 25% youth unemployment, and in a country where 40% of the population is under 15 the petrochemical industry isn’t going to provide all the jobs that will be needed to prevent social unrest.

What is? Increasing the size of the manufacturing sector is a key policy goal in many states, and Mubadala, one of Abu Dhabi’s investment agencies has already announced plans to build an AMD fab in the emirate but this is only the start. The longer term goal, and the financial and political situation in many of the the Gulf states allows the luxury of long term planning, is to develop new technology based industries in materials, aerospace, semiconductors, renewable energy and pharmaceuticals but based on a whole host of new and emerging technologies such as nanotech, industrial biotech and regenerative medicine.

While Dubai may in the eye of a storm right now, the longer term prospects for the region look as bright as the desert sun.

Ozymandias by Percy Bysshe Shelley

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: “Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
`My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!’
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away”.

1. Renewable energy interest tends to lag oil prices by 6-12 months and with oil almost back to 2006 levels a lot of transient interest will evaporate
2. Lot’s of clean tech companies based their business models on sustained high oil and commodity prices – so a recalculation will reveal that they don’t stand a cats chance in hell of being profitable
3. The stampede by Venture Capital into every clean tech deal going for the last two years has inflated valuations to levels that will never return any cash to investors – and that was before anyone took into account  recessions & pestilence
4. As a result, VCs would find themselves locked into very expensive deals and have trouble shaking down their limited partners for the funds necessary to keep in the hunt

Don’t say you weren’t warned. It must be getting serious when even VCs are getting contrite – according to the New York Times:

David J. Prend, managing general partner at RockPort Capital in Boston and Menlo Park, Calif., said that the promise of big returns prompted too much “me-too investing,” when venture capitalists put money into start-ups that do the same work as other companies.

“There was probably some stuff that shouldn’t have been funded,” he said. “It’s kind of good for some of that to get washed out.” For clean tech to be a viable industry, investment should not return to recent highs, he said.

Mr. Vassallo blamed the credit crunch for the decline in clean-tech investing. More than half of clean-tech investments have been in alternative energy like solar and biofuels, which typically require building big factories. These projects depend on capital like project finance loans as well as tax equity investments, whereby corporations back green energy projects and reap the tax credits. These have been “frozen or completely disintegrated,” he said.

This is weird & spooky. Didn’t the same folks say the same thing about dot com investing, about nanotech and now clean tech? Are these the people we see rooted to spot, continually banging their heads against a wall crying “I know there was an exit here somewhere!”

Mark G. Heesen, president of the National Venture Capital Association, prefers to call the clean-tech investment cycle “an education curve.”
Still, he said, “if the industry has gotten one criticism year after year, it’s that we have a lemming mentality, and solar probably represents that in the clean-tech space.”

Here’s my first attempt, not word for word but using the same notes so it may be the same thing in a slightly different order, so now you can do something more useful while listening to my mellifluous tones with a bit of added hiss. If I do this again I promise to buy a proper microphone!

There are two things happening here, and neither of them are particularly productive. Firstly there is the underlying assumption that anything bio, i.e natural, must be better than something synthetic like, erm, oil (which is the product of something that did grow once!) which seemed plausible enough to convince politicians around the world to set targets for biofuel use. Of course it has finally dawned that oil can be pumped out of the ground in inhospitable areas if the world whereas the growing of biofuel plants requires the grubbing up of land that would otherwise be used for food production.

What worries me more is the sort of inflexible thinking that this article, and many others addressing future energy needs and sustainability embody. Switching from something edible to something inedible as a feedstock for ethanol production doesn’t solve the problem any more than living in a tree will mitigate climate change.  Growing stuff in fields is something we have been doing for ten thousand years, and it s such an easy trick that even ants can do it, so we need to think about doing something new, something that makes some use of three or four thousand years of civilization, philosophy and science rather than banging our heads repeatedly against the (cave) wall.

If we want to get smart about this, we need to take something that we already have lots of, and find a waste by product that we can utilise, trees for example. Now before anybody jumps up and down pointing out that you can’t make ethanol directory from wood, and all the maple trees in Canada wouldn’t make much difference, we do know that. That’s where the technology comes in.

As often happens with these technologies, you have to get from A to B (or in this case trees to ethanol) via a few other places, and most of those places involve biotechnology and synthetic biology to transform a waste material (and plenty of stuff is thrown away during paper making for example) into a more useful material. Often a second or third step is needed to get to B, but doing this using microbes is much more energy efficient and cleaner than processing biofuels in a refinery.

Get that right and there is no need to take up any additional land, or to plant any additional crops, and you can play this trick with a number of other materials. While some of the technologies I have been looking at (which is why I have to be deliberately sketchy above) are a few years away from commercial use, I’m pretty sure that biofuels in 20 years time will be produced in a far more sensible and efficient way than currently envisaged.

Predictably, Friends of the Earth are dead against this approach, rather short sightedly equating any new technology with unacceptable risk. It’s all very well to carp from the sidelines, but given the urgency of finding solutions to global problems such as water and energy, spending twenty years rejecting any technology based solution doesn’t seem particularly enlightened – even toddlers tantrums blow over quicker!

I spent a rather enlightening afternoon today at the UK Aware Ideas for Greener Living exhibition speaking on a panel hosted by Francis Sealy of 21st Century Network (@21stCN).

Francis had selected a panel consisting of a technology expert (myself) and a couple of people who were interested in living a more simple life. One of these, a chap called Duncan who had come all the way from Brixton on a recumbent bicycle was an expert on transition towns – listeners to The Archers will know about that idea – while Tracey Smith is the person behind International Downshifting Week and is full of bright ideas for things to do that don’t involve going out and spending money (staying at home and cooking naked pizzas seems to be the new going out).

Looking at the panel, and the exhibition as well, I detected two distinct strands emerging. One is the down shifting/simplicity type movement which involved sewing your own clothes out of bits of rag (I’ve seen people do this in the slums of Howrah as well) and living a simple life after the manner of a 17th century Hebridean crofter. The other solution seemed to involve shoving batteries in things, card, bucycles etc, or making things including, intriguingly, a bicycle  made out of compressed waste paper. So we have simplicity versus technology in a rather crude home made sort of way. Both have their attractions too – a lot of basic skills such as cooking or mending clothes have been lost to the current generation, so I can understand the thrill of discovering that you can do things for yourself. On the other hand driving a plastic battery powered car might make you feel good, but the bill for the new battery after five years and the life cycle carbon emissions will probably make you feel a but queasy.

The Brixton Transition Town project is based on building a local community with its own currency, independent of greedy/misguided central banks, and based on the premise that everything can be done locally. I can see how this would work in rural areas where you have plenty of agricultural produce to barter, and it worked pretty well in the iron age, but London is a big place and the only things you can raise here are pigeons and rats, and I don’t care how sustainable they are, I’m not eating those. A new Brixton Fruit & Nut (and two tomotoes) map may help broaden the diet, but I don;t think Tesco will be too worried. While I applaud the idea behind it, it is at best a very small scale project which not everyone will opt into, perhaps a kind of 21st century collective urban farm? I hope I’m proved wrong.

What shocked me the most was the views of my co panellists. I’ll spare the blushes, but after both had talked about the power of doing positive things for the benefit of the planet/humanity one of them said “The economic crisis is great – it will force people to change” while the other gleefully cried “Peak Oil and the Credit Crunch – Bring It On!!!!”  Come on, is it worth the misery and social deprivation, the homes reposessed, the families split up and the spike in violent crime caused by a recession just to set up a sustainable vegetable trading scheme in Brixton? And they called Margaret Thatcher heartless…

But the point that, hopefully I managed to make was that technology and living in harmony with the planet don’t have to be mutually exclusive. Technology has produced almost all the economic growth of the last three hundred years, and in answer to a question about why we need growth I suggested we contrast quality of life in London and Lagos. Given that everyone is aware of the green/sustainability/carbon/fossil fuel dependence agenda now, many businesses are seeing this as positive thing rather than a millstone, and there is a wonderful opportunity to use technology to make the world better – LED lighting, one of the things on display is a classic case of something where technology can make a huge difference at a low cost. I have a lot of LED lighting at home, it’s better than the dim low energy bulbs, and when mixed with halogen lighting it is possible to fiund an acceptable colour balance.

From the audience, if not from the panel, I took home a sense of frustration with the slow progress being made to reduce emission and tackle environmental issues. Pondering this as I walked across Hyde Park on my way home, a flock of geese flew low overhead, heading for the Serpentine, and I realise that we have already made a lot of progress. The Yorkshire I grew up in was one of black grime caked buildings, belching mills and slag heaps from the mines, it looked like Mordor in the Lord of the Rings movies. Most of our rivers were dead and filled with a chemical sludge and the only bird you ever saw in Bradford were starlings and the seagulls who lived on the rubbish tips. While there are bits of China that still look like that, the rate at which China is adopting clean technologies means that their industrial revolution will blight the landscape for a fraction of the time we had to put up with in the UK.So I suppose we are moving in the right direction already, we just need to pick up the pace.

Looking at the sustainable products in the exhibition, most of them seemed to both more expensive than the non eco versions you can buy and perform rather badly. My instinct is that by using technology rather than rejecting it, we should be able to produce some quite incredible products at a very low cost to both the environment and the consumer. Perhaps the real reason that the whole green economy isn’t quite working is that most of the products seem to have been designed by teepee dwellers with as much idea about economics as Gordon Brown? Swapping organic rats for Tibetan prayer beads won’t change the world no matter what that old hippy tells you.

But in the end, I think I’m a convert to the green cause. Not because of  people who think that riding around on a funny bicycle for the rest of your life and eating roadside weeds will save the planet, because compared to a couple of new power stations in China it won’t make any difference at all. What did it for me was realising that the vast majority of perfectly normal people at this event just want to ensure a nice future for their children, who are worried about running out of resources with no alternatives in sight, and who are less interested in smashing the global financial system than having a system that ensures some kind of sustainable and prosperous future.

An almost final question from the audience was “what would you do in the next twenty four hours to make a difference?” I think I’ve just done it, so let’s pick up the pace!

The Dear Leader - Ready to Debate Nanotechnology?

The Australian branch of Friends of the Earth, who really really hate nanotechnology, yes really, and will do anything they can to stop it (despite not being quite sure what it is) are threatening apoplexy, tantrums and running naked through the streets of Canberra painted blue as a result of the Australian Governments decision to have a “Nanodialogue on Nanotechnology and Food Regulation.”

The do seem rather Stalinist when it comes to the idea any discussion of the role of nanotechnologies, and have refused to take part with the assertion that the “primary purpose (of the Australian Office of Nanotechnology) in this area is to promote uncritical public acceptance of nanotechnology.”This does seem a little hypocritical for an organisation which seems to have gone out of its way to promote uncritical public hostility to nanotechnologies.

Part of FoE’s beef is that the government has made a decision to fund nanotechnology in Australia without consulting every Tom, Dick or Bruce about what they are funding, and giving them an option to veto any bit of science funding that they don’t like the look of. Unfortunately for FoE, the concept of representative democracy is something they can add to their list of things they don’t quite understand. Another addition could be how science actually works – there is no simple path from science to application, as this list of unintended consequences of science, quite brilliantly illustrates, with accidents leading to the invention of the telephone, antibiotics and photography.

They have even gone as far as to send a letter to the Australian Minister for Innovation, Industry, Science and Research, Kim Carr, outlining the circumstances under which they would take part – presumably having an anti nano ranter on stage would appease them.

What really worries me is not so much that FoE seem to be rather dim when it comes to handling ideas any more complex than ‘environment good – everything else bad” but the venomous hostility of some NGOs, FoE Australia included, to any kind of informed and rational debate about nanotechnologies. I can quite understand why Jim Jong-Il might not want a public debate on his handling of the North Korean economy, but what on earth are the Friends of the Earth so afraid of?

Saving 10 tons of CO2/year

I’m not sure whether the credit crunch has brought on about of pre apocalyptic fever  or whether living a a world of instant gratification has resulted in attempting anything on a timescale of more than a few weeks has people wailing & gnashing their teeth in jaw snapping frustration. Whatever the cause, environmental issues seem to be resulting in a lot of people foaming at the mouth, stripping off their clothes and running around in the snow barking at car drivers, advocating compulsory sterilization or writing bizarre articles.

Ottilia Saxl takes time off from kicking the backsides of whoever recently besmirched the good name of the Institute of Nanotechnology to be absolutely furious at global governments for “failing the stop use of fossil fuels, failing to limit population growth, failing to protect the rainforest…” and gives a ragbag of reasons why nanotechnology is a vital part of any solution. In fact the new issue of Nano Magazine is packed with articles about how nanotech could help save the planet, and therein lies the problem.

Most of these kind of articles spend 50% of their length regurgitating well known facts about population growth, energy usage and infant mortality, working themselves up into a frenzy of moral indignation, only to let the reader down with the news that researchers somewhere have come up with an idea that may have the possibility to address some problem or other at some point in the future.

I always find this kind of article rather lazy and ultimately disappointing, after all it’s just a matter of cutting and pasting two groups of facts and finding some justification to link them.

So, if you really want to save the planet, stop wasting time and energy by writing pointless articles based on flimsy evidence. Charity starts at home, but saving the environment starts in the governments of India, China and the USA. There are also a number of other ways to make a difference

1. Breathe less. An average persons respiration generates some 900g of carbon dioxide a day, so by breathing less, or avoiding getting steamed up over global warming issues you could make a real difference immediately.
2. Shoot yourself. My thanks to Jonathan Porrit for pointing out that doing something about population could help stop climate change, even if he can’t do the demographic maths too well. Of course the quickest way to make a difference would be to shoot yourself. Ending your life 40 years ahead of schedule would save over 400 tons of carbon dioxide, and this could be easily increased by bumping off a few other people too.

Disclaimer: As science education and common sense seem to be in short supply when ‘climate change’ is concerned,  I should point out that I am not suggesting that anyone actually follows either of the techniques above, or wastes any time working out the amount of  carbon dioxide saved by genocidal megalomaniacs in the 20th century.

• The DOE is the principal supporter of physical sciences in the US, and the physical sciences are the conernstone of prosperity for the US future.
• Restimulation (is that a word?) of the economy is #1 on the priority list. DOE will get considerable funds in the stimulus package, not just to get the economy going but to provide a long term path for the US.

The grand challenge that the DoE is setting in terms of sustainable energy is certainly laudable. Whether or not you believe in anthropogenic global warming or have any faith in the measures taken to date is irrelevant in the face of the absurdity of over reliance on a single form of energy.It certainly seems to have inspired and excited plenty of people…

I am truly awed by the vision presented by Chu here, and so hopeful that we can get our country back on a path to long term prosperity by supporting research in the physical sciences. At least half of our present economy relies on the knowledge gained in the 20th century about our physical world…one can only imagine the revolutions to come.