Dana Blankenhorn

Moore's Law of Solar

The amount of solar energy in use will double every 12-18 months for as far out as I can see.

Gordon Moore (right) created the first Moore's Law, a 1965 preduction that chip density would double every 12-18 months for many years.

That has come true, and I've applied Moore's name to many other fields where I think it's warranted, where exponential improvements of that type are happening, and where I see them continuing to happen.

I've come in for some stick for that, and maybe Mr. Moore himself is unhappy with me. For that I'm sorry. But I'm no one, he's someone, and his name makes explicable predictions that seem inexplicable. It gets people thinking in new ways about the future, about possibilities. So that's why I do it.

That's a long winded way of saying that Moore's Law of Solar isn't Gordon Moore speaking.

It's me.

It's important to put down a marker like this down right now, lest the current industry shake-0ut get you down. That shake-out continued apace today when Solyndra announced it was filing under Chapter 11, and expects to go out of business.

It's easy to see my prediction coming true for several reasons:

1. Tons of solar energy is going in off-the-grid.
2. Solar technology continues to change rapidly.
3. Costs continue to decline as technologies scale.

The production of actual panels is not a great business right now, but that's the stage of the market we're at. We don't yet have the industry's version of a PC, something you can just buy, plug in, that will make you money.

Paper Era Only Now Ending

Paper demand is finally trending down, due to tablets and ebooks. Apple has succeeded where Microsoft failed. More here.

Al Gore Needs A Nice Big Cup of STFU (He's Not Helping)

Al Gore feels passionately about the environment and the climate crisis.

So do I. So do a lot of people.

But Al Gore's words aren't helping solve the climate crisis. In fact, they're hurting. His allies aren't covering him any more, and his allies are using him as the butt of jokes. Yes, Gore-o-phobia is unfair. But it's real, and he needs to deal with it.

We all need to, by taking Al Gore from the field of political battle. Bodily, if need be.

Some headlines from his latest outburst. “Climate change skeptics are like racists”  – TG Daily. The same headline is on the Daily Caller.  “Meat = Global Warming” – Consumer Freedom. “You Knew This Was Coming” – PowerLine.

Now I know these are not friendly outlets. But Al Gore has become on the environment what Fonda became on Vietnam. Always the enemy, and always the excuse for ignoring anything not only they say but anyone they know says.

Jonathan Moorman of “Ology” was pretty calm about it. “When you start comparing your opponents to racists, you know what that does? End the conversation outright and force everyone away from the middle.” 

Al Gore needs a nice big cup of STFU.

The Changing Nature of PC Production

In all the hoop-dee-doo about whether the PC is dead, or the nature of the tablet market, a very important point is being missed.

PCs, tablets, e-book readers, phones – no consumer electronic product is “made” any more. It's designed, it's ordered, it's distributed, it's exploited. Made? Not so much.

This dawned on me with news that Amazon  expects to sell 3-5 million Amazon-branded tablets this year.  The company hasn't even announced a product yet, but Forrester Research says they expect a hit because of Amazon's ability to exploit such a device through its cloud infrastructure.

Back in the 20^th century (and you can write that without irony now, just as someone at the dawn of WWI could write “back in the 19^th century” without irony) you needed a factory to build computers. At least an assembly plant. The names on your PC corresponded to the company building the device.

No more.

The Low-Hanging Fruit

Think of this as Volume 15, Number 36 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

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The way to success as a manager, or a consumer, is to focus on the low-hanging fruit.

That's the easy money. That's the opportunity that will give you the most profit with the least investment.

But identifying the low-hanging fruit is extremely difficult.

And at the bottom of a recession, at the start of a major sea change in how we live, that in itself is the low-hanging fruit.

For instance, most people know that "green" is good, and that it's profitable. But they are frozen in place, unable to move, because they don't know where the low-hanging fruit is.

There is an enormous profession in maintaining the efficiency of business operations, of identifying waste and taking it out, starting with the large sources and moving on to the smaller ones. This is why American business works so well. People are empowered to do this, and over time they do.

Of course public opinion lags this badly. One quick example. Most people know Southwest Air is the most efficient U.S. air carrier, and that companies like Delta (which run an old-style hub-and-spoke system) are much less profitable. But did you know that Southwest is among the most unionized of American carriers, Delta the least-unionized?

The issue, in other words, the source of inefficiency, may not be what you think.

They Can't Argue With Profit

There is a new flurry of FUD coming from Big Oil. Its aim is to derail the move toward renewable energy and redirect subsidies toward natural gas.

It's done with selective editing.

Many, for instance, have grabbed a July paper from James Hansen , a Columbia University professor and head of the Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland, which argues with 20-20 hindsight that “soft renewables” like wind and solar can't replace fossil fuels “any time soon.”

OilPrice uses Hansen's discussion to claim he's gone over to their side. In fact they are deliberately ignoring his conclusions:

As long as fossil fuels are cheap, they will be burned. But fossil fuels are cheap only because they do not pay their costs to society. Costs include direct and indirect subsidies, human health costs from air and water pollution, and climate change impacts on current and future generations.

The public can appreciate that a rising price must be placed on fossil fuel emissions, if we are to phase out our addiction to fossil fuels. A carbon fee must be placed across-the-board on all fossil fuels in proportion to carbon emissions. The fee should be collected from fossil fuel companies at the first domestic sale (at domestic mine or port of entry). 

In other words, Hansen wants a rising carbon tax to impose a real price on carbon fuel sources. He wants what I want – price equalization. He just doesn't shy away from calling it a tax.

The Best Journalist In The World

It's not me. It's no one who was trained in the field.

It's this guy. Anthony Bourdain. A cook.

At the heart of all the best journalist is that you go to the heart of the story, that you invest yourself in the story you're telling, and that you change as the reader or viewer changes. 

This is what Bourdain does. It's what no one else does, because we're all trained to be detached, like cops, or given the concept of a “false equivalency,” which makes all actions by anyone equally valid. Which is crazy.

What made Bourdain a journalist was his Beirut show in 2006.  As he said, he went there as a snarky chef out to stuff his face and have a good time. He left it as a refugee, in an American warship. You can actually see the change take hold of him as the show goes on.

It never left. We can all be thankful for that. Because when you watch the run of his shows since then, he's a different man, with a different mission. Instead of having “fixers” show him where the good restaurants are, now he works to find sources who can tell him the story of a place. And then he sits, and he listens, and in the editing room he explains.

It's beautiful.

The Most Dangerous Legal Argument in the World

Oracle has escalated its war of legal words with Google with the most dangerous argument possible.

The burden is on Google to show the APIs it copied do not contain copyrightable expression because Oracle registered the copyrighted works at issue, which include the API specifications and the code.

Sounds innocuous, and it's supposed to. But if accepted by the court, and on appeal, it completely transforms the software landscape.

Oracle is arguing that it can copyright APIs and prevent companies from even connecting to its programs with them, without its permission, which may include demands for payment or for other business arrangements, at its sole discretion.

This would be a profound expansion of copyright, which remember lasts for the life of the creator plus 75 years, and is routinely extended any times it seems like Mickey Mouse might enter the public domain. (There is constant talk of making copyright eternal as well, and eliminating the public domain entirely.)

The Year the Telephone Died

Everyone's talking about the PC dying, and HP's decision to get out of the business seems to confirm it. But the PC's not dying.

The telephone is dying.

A smartphone is not a phone. A smartphone is a mobile Internet client. On a smartphone telephony is a low-bandwidth service, just as it is on a PC. And with the wealth of the Internet in your hand, synchronous services like voice lose their place.

This is having many profound impacts on our lives and world that we don't yet credit. As a reporter my first resort was once to call someone to learn something. Now I go online first, and even when I call I am very unlikely to get any service. PR stands in the way of almost any real newsmaker. The way to flush them out is to Tweet them or just write with what's available. There is usually a lot.

Revolt of the Optimists

Think of this as Volume 15, Number 35 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

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There is an iron law in American politics.

The optimists win.

The media and most professionals ignore this law because they think it's a gloss, something you can put onto a campaign like lipstick on a pig. It's not. The side that exudes optimism from every pore, that has a positive agenda addressing pressing issues, almost always wins American elections.

The Obama campaign recognized this truth early-on, which is one reason why it was vitally important (in retrospect) that they stayed apart from the “netroots,” sites like DailyKos, Firedoglake and Americablog. It's not that these left-wing sites want to be pessimistic. It's just that living in the trenches of politics, day after day, is living in a sausage factory. It grinds you down, it gets you angry, it makes you pessimistic.

Most grassroots political movements, even of the Astroturf kind, are born of anger and pessimism. It's what the other side isn't doing, what “those people in power” are keeping from happening. It's very easy to say what you're against, it's easy to organize a protest. It's much harder to build something positive.

From a business standpoint it's not in the interests of Kos & Co. to be positive, however. On a day to day basis, it doesn't sell to activists. It's pointing your readers in a direction they are not inclined to go in.

Yet there is a positive change agenda sitting before us, waiting to be seized. As regular readers of this blog know, it starts with what I call the War Against Oil.