Major Downturns Have an Upside – The Emergence and Growth of New Business Ideas

Economic recessions create bursts of economic and cultural change. Did the buggy and coach business just fade away?  Or did those companies die most quickly in the Panic of 1907-1908 and the Post-WWI Recession, only to be replaced by rapidly expanding businesses involved with motor vehicles, and a rising economic tide to lift them?  What new inventions attained increasingly levels of acceptance and use as people struggled for every advantage to dig themselves out of the recessionary problems of the Great Depression?  Were businesses developing lighter construction materials, alternative energy systems, and fuel conservation technologies some of the positive outcomes of the Oil Crisis and recession of 1973-1975?

Whose Lives Will Change Most as Fossil Fuel Prices Rise?

Fossil fuel prices will rise. There’s no doubting that, in the absence of any other supply of cheap, high volume energy, fossil fuel supplies will decline, and prices will rise as population continues to explode.  It is interesting to examine who is most likely to feel the effects of the change, as I don’t think many people, at least in North America where I live, are thinking about it.  In the end, it appears that the middle classes in the most developed countries and in the temperate climates will feel the effects the most.

Will Anything Reduce Global Birth Rates and Carbon Emissions Except Fossil Fuel Shortages?

Today the news proclaimed that agreements were made at the G-8 summit in Italy to hold global warming to a maximum of 2 degrees Centrigrade.  It was a very positive step to see that the United States has finally joined most of the rest the world in making a commitment to fighting climate change.  Will people really be able to do this, though?  And aren’t population and energy use just as important if not moreso?

The Shark Cage is Rusty – How Capitalism and Government Might Change for the Better

Corporations, by their nature, are focused on profits. Unfortunately, this causes them to sub-optimize the overall results for society. This is one of the shortcomings of the current capitalist system. Corporations, in their soulless drive for profits, will take your last dollar if they can, and will influence governments and drive them away from their original purpose, to ensure the common good and the positive evolution of society in ways that reflect the principle that, as they say in business school, “a rising tide lifts all boats.”  I found an interesting and pointed expression of this last year.

The Dark Planets Conjecture

Why haven’t we detected any evidence of alien intelligences yet? The wallpaper on one of my computers is the composite picture NASA published in 2000 of the entire earth at night. The amount of light visible from space is at once beautiful and intriguing, and it makes me wonder how much energy we waste by unintentionally beaming it into space, whether it is light, infrared radiation (heat), or radio waves. Looking back through human history, it is clear that, as a species, we used comparatively little of our planet’s resources before the industrial revolution, and I suspect the view from space back then showed very little human-made light, if any. Then I contemplate the probability that, in the absence of any great new energy-producing technology (fusion?), we will run down our available fossil fuel sources over the coming decades, driving the price up to the point where fewer and fewer people and organizations can afford to use and waste energy as we do today. In another century or two we may be conserving energy to such an extent that we will have to stop our light, heat, and radio waves from dissipating into space, and the planet may return to the way it appeared before the industrial revolution. This brings up some interesting questions about our universe.

The Lights of the City Aren’t the Same to Me Any More

As a young man I sometimes drove to a high spot in town after dark, a park from which you could look out over the city, and parked my car to enjoy the twinkling of the city lights spread out before me.  It was a beautiful sight, and I could only marvel at what humanity had created.  I’ve learned a lot and thought a lot since then, however, and it all looks different to me now, or least, it provokes different thoughts and perceptions. 

Future Cost Increases for Fossil Fuels Will Change Architecture

My new job puts me in a large windowless warehouse-like building, much of which has been turned into office space, cube farms with offices embedded in the walls nearby.  At any given time nobody inside knows if it is raining or if the sun is shining, if it’s day or night.  As in most commercial buildings, the lights and ventilation fans run almost all the time, which seems costly.  One nearby building has a small wind turbine on it that runs a lot of the time, however, and another I see near work has a solar panel on the roof.   All that has made me consider what the buildings of thirty years from now will be like.  Certainly they will be quite different, and I expect the inevitable rise in the cost of fossil fuels, and all energy sources “in sympathy”, to be an important influence on their architecture.  So what will commercial buildings be like in the future?

“The Bomb” is Here, But It’s the Population Bomb

My childhood fears of nuclear war have come to pass, but not the way I expected. When I was a kid I had a great fear of nuclear war.  At school we drilled, hiding under our desks, in case Russian missiles with nuclear warheads should wreak terrible, radioactive firestorms on us.  One winter night around the age of 6 I woke up from a dream and looked out the window to see the sky glowing yellow – I was immediately convinced that either a nuclear attack was creating the incredible light in the sky, or that the nearby Fermi nuclear power plant had blown up, and in either case the radiation would soon get us.  As it turned out, it was just a full moon illuminating a light snowfall, but I will never forget the terror of those moments.  These days, with nuclear war seeming to be a much more remote possibility, I don’t even think about it.  The other night, however, I noticed the sky glowing orange most of the way around the horizon, and realized that, if I didn’t know it was street lights illuminating the falling snow, I would have thought a nuclear war had broken out.  The lights were like those of an explosion frozen in time.  Then I realized that this IS an explosion – a population explosion.  This extremely long, slow-motion explosion started over a century ago and the echoes won’t die out for decades, or maybe centuries, to come.  Unfortunately this explosion has consequences potentially more devastating than even a global nuclear war.  So what are we doing about it?  How can we mitigate the effects of this very-slow, long term explosion on ourselves and our descendants?

What Will Happen to Businesses When Energy Cost Eclipses Labor Cost?

Today the cost of labor is the biggest single cost element for many businesses, and drives most decisions. The rise of fossil fuel prices will not be smooth,  however, as we have seen in 2008, when oil prices doubled in a matter of months and then fell back to 30% of their peak in a few months more.  During these spikes, and in the longer term as fossil fuel sources become more difficult and costly to extract, energy costs will rise to a level that challenges or surpasses labor as the biggest component of cost for many or most businesses.  The law of supply and demand also kicks in as population continues to expand, and labor costs in many industries will fall as increasing numbers of people are seeking those jobs.  At the same time, rising energy costs will reduce or eliminate the advantage of manufacturing in “low cost countries” such as China.  How will businesses react?  Will the net effect be to cause people to generally live at a lower economic level and make less money for equivalent work compared with today?  Will manufacturing of progressively lower cost and higher margin goods return to the developed countries?

Could Nanotechnology-Enhanced Fabrics Yield High-Tech Clothing?

High-tech clothing could help us save energy in the future. Could nanotechnology be used to create fabrics that modify their insulating or heat-transferring capabilities on demand?   Clothing already exists with built in solar cells and connections to charge one’s cell phone or MP3 player.  In the future, though, saving energy on our biggest uses such as home heating will be important, and clothing that allows us to turn down the thermostat could be a great application for nanotechnology.

Infrastructure Will Change Significantly as Population Inevitably Declines Towards a Sustainable Level

Studies of past population reveal some valuable facts with implications for our future. Given that, before the widespread use of fossil fuels, there were apparently never more than about a billion humans on the planet, the fact that we are over six billion now and climbing fast, and that fossil fuels prices are already rising due to increased scarcity, it is probable that human population will decline back toward the one billion level in the next century. This suggests a variety of scenarios for making the adjustment. Most scenarios sound bad, but the challenge to us is to create and implement long term plans to manage the change. Given what we can anticipate, can we sufficiently raise the importance of taking the long term view and making long range plans to minimize the pain of the adjustments we face in the future? The economy and infrastructure will have to change significantly, but how? How will the business world change in response?

Why and How Do We Avoid Addressing Global Warming and Similar Problems?

A brilliant article opened my eyes as to how and why we keep ducking our biggest problems. I recently came across an article by Dr. Albert Bandura that is simply a brilliant analysis of human behavior as relates to the need for sustainability, and I put it in my sidebar of favorite links.  Since then what I read has kept coming back to me, as I think his paper explains a great deal about why we are where we are today.  I have long been perplexed about the fact that the main stream media almost never brings up overpopulation as a problem, and only global warming has gotten anywhere near the attention such problems deserve (though energy shortages are an up-and-coming second, and water shortages not far behind).  Dr. Bandura’s article is deep and scientific, and not the easiest to read for a variety reasons, perhaps more than anything because it describes us, but also because it is written in the language of the science of psychology.  For that reason I have written this entry to try to break down into simpler language what is going on.  Why do people keep doing things we know are bad for our future, and why do they ignore or dispute the facts?

Why Can’t I Shingle My Roof with Solar Cells Now?

Why can’t I shingle my roof with solar cells now? Years ago I heard about a company in the Southwestern U.S. that makes polymer solar cells in sheets, so inexpensive that they were predicted to be able to provide a roofing product that would generate electricity by perhaps 2003. Since I first heard of them, I have heard of other companies in Europe and the United States with even more interesting technologies – solar cells being printed by ink jet printers on rolls of polymer, and which use nano-scale particles to achieve much higher efficiency than previous, similar concepts. Where are they, and why aren’t we seeing these new technologies coming on-line?

Does Keeping Fuel Prices Low Hurt Us in the Long Run?

Does fighting price increases caused by supply-demand forces stop the free market from working and worsen our future problems? In other words, does prosecuting price gougers during gas shortages hurt us in the long run? I’m going to take a potentially-unpopular position here for the sake of argument and as a thought starter. Price gouging sounds like a real crime – sellers taking advantage of buyers who have serious needs and no recourse – but isn’t that just the free market at work? By making laws against sudden, demand-induced price increases aren’t we artificially controlling the price and removing people’s incentives to change their behavior for the better? During gas shortages people panic and hoard supplies, but wouldn’t high prices make people think of more effective ways to deal with the crisis before it happens the next time?  The good news is that  many people seem to be getting the message: fossil fuels won’t last forever, and we need alternatives now, or as soon as possible.

Will Rising Energy Costs De-Globalize Us into Regional Economies?

Short term fluctuations in energy prices notwithstanding, the long term trend of rising energy costs will affect commerce and change where our goods are manufactured. Last May I heard a radio interview in which an importer in New York City said the cost of moving a container of goods from China to NYC had increased in less than a year from $4000 to $5600, and it occurred to me that this is a greater increase than the gross margin on many of the less expensive goods currently being shipped.  Will manufacturing return to the affluent areas like North America and Europe in a reversal of the globalization trend we’ve seen in the last few decades, due to increasing energy prices?