Recent news: The space shuttle Atlantis docked at the international space station on May 16, 2010, after officials decided there would be no need to perform a maneuver to avoid a piece of debris.
This may well have been the last flight of Atlantis. Following this mission it will be kept in working order, to be used as a possible rescue vehicle for one of the few remaining manned space flights. While risk is still a crucial factor in the manned space program, in some ways, the program appears to be “yesterday’s news.”
Columnist Thomas Friedman has challenged us to launch a green energy technology program to match the intensity of the information technology program that has evolved over the past seventy years. And he gives us a sound barometer to measure how we’ll know when the energy technology movement is beginning to make a real difference. It will be when we have failures. He’s talking about the kind of failures that occurred in the information revolution. Failure is a reflection of the healthy competition that evolves from Darwin’s theory of survival of the fittest.
The ashes and rubble of failed programs and companies in the information revolution litter recent history. But in many cases, each failure represented someone else’s success.
In the 1950s, the Navy’s Vanguard missile program to launch an unmanned satellite suffered one mishap after another, while the Army’s Redstone program succeeded in launching Explorer 1, an eighteen lb. satellite, into space on January 31, 1958, where it remained for twenty-two years. The Army’s work was the precursor to NASA’s manned-space program.
On the commercial level, we see today’s winners: Apple, Intel, Sun Microsystems, Sony, Canon, Nikon, Microsoft, and many others. Friedman asserts that they stand tall and in many cases continue to battle one another because they won the battles with previous competitors. Some may remember the Commodore 64, which in the early 1980s was considered the class of the personal computing field. But its operating system could not keep up with the Macintosh OS and Microsoft’s DOS and then Windows. Prior to the Commodore, we had the first personal computer, the Radio Shack TRS-80. Unfortunately for the company, the computer lived up to its nickname, the TRASH-80.
If you were an investor in the 1980s, you were constantly getting tips on this company or that, one of which was going to revolutionize the computer industry. The low-price stock might be making memory chips, fiber optics, new welding techniques, or the “brains” to the newest device to swipe credit cards.
While we remember tech stocks as being good investments in the 1980s and 1990s, we forget that most of the losers had investors, and they often lost all of their equity in a failed company.
Friedman’s point is surprisingly simple and logical. Look at the table below and, while you can’t write on your computer screen, think of how many information technology companies you could list in the left column and how few green energy technology companies your could list in the right column.
| Information Technology Companies | Green Energy Companies |
| 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. |
1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. |
The green energy companies are there, they are just hard to find because they’re not that large (you’re not allowed to count a company called ‘BP’ that wants you to think that its initials stand for ‘Beyond Petroleum’).
Friedman takes the analogy between information and clean energy one step further. I.T. essentially got its start from government. During World War II, the U.S., U.K., Germany, Soviet Union, France, and Italy were all working on hi-tech devices, mainly to become weapons of mass destruction or to be used for espionage. Following the war, the American and Soviet governments put hundreds of billions of dollars into programs that could only succeed if based on information technology. First the U.S. worked through the military, then NASA, and by giving tax incentives for research and development as well as building an infrastructure for the internet.
Friedman contends that green energy will become successful when it advances so far that we don’t even use the adjective ‘green’ in front of it, because all energy will be assumed to be green. This phenomenon will happen when the government makes large financial commitments to partner with private entrepreneurs as it did with the information revolution. Some of the private companies will succeed and make investors wealthy, and others will go by the wayside and leave some investors holding the bag. But this is how it worked in our last major revolution and how it has to be if we are going to be successful in going green.
If and when a green revolution succeeds, the corporate corpses may include large fossil-fuel energy companies that currently thrive, as well as start-ups that by design or misfortune just didn’t find a niche in the program. So if you want to see the clean energy program really take off, look for the failures as well as the successes.