Will Exxon Get Googled?

http://spectator.org/archives/2009/01/14/will-exxon-get-googled

by haidut • 17 years ago

3 1 17 years ago

mojonixon• 17 years ago

thesis: the only measure that matters in auto transport is energy density, and you can't do better than gasoline so there can't be any big disruptive technology as far as Exxon is concerned.

He's right about the energy density but makes a lot of crappy assumptions. He assumes auto transport is preferable to begin with (as do the politicians that choose highway funds over mass transit). He also doesn't consider that at a certain price (at the pump or environmental externalities), energy density becomes a less critical variable in the transportation equation.

There's also some general weirdness in the article. "The essence of digital-silicon technology is that more and more information can be stored and transported in ever smaller, profoundly less energy-intensive ways. Millions, soon billions, of ever tinier information engines (a.k.a. transistors) are etched onto a sliver of silicon." ok

"On top of this, software engineers use clever mathematical codes made ever more powerful by microprocessors, to parse, slice, and shrink information itself, compressing it without loss of essence. The combination is powerful. Compared to the dawn of computing, today’s information-moving hardware consumes one million times less energy for a logic operation and can store data in a physical space 100 million times smaller. And progress continues." uh, what? has compression really improved in the past 20 years? If anything, software engineers are doing there best to waste the efficiency gains in hardware.

"OIL IS A REMARKABLE ENERGY SOURCE that is also uniquely easy to transport and store."[emphasis his] Oil is not an energy source, it's a transport and storage mechanism; storing millions of years of solar power.

Oh, the guy wrote "The Bottomless Well: The Twilight of Fuel, the Virtue of Waste, and Why We Will Never Run Out of Energy" (he means that literally). He spent most of the article going on about the physical limitations of renewable resources. He's a maroon.

Will Exxon Get Googled?

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