Reinvention at 56

Think of this as Volume 14, Number 49 of A-Clue.com, the online newsletter I've written since 1997. Enjoy.

It cheered me this week to think of my career as being that of an old western hero. (Or anti-hero, if I'm on your bad side, or if you're on mine.)

I come to an undiscovered beat. I watch as people build out the town. When the money comes in, when the frontier is settled, I move on, not entirely by choice, to the next frontier.

Sometimes there is a Paint Your Wagon feel to the thing. The Houston oil boom crashed and burned in 1981. The dot-com became the dot-bomb in 2000. Knowing these disasters were imminent did not help me.

More often I'm kicked out when I get too comfortable. I have been fired from every good job I ever had. From the Birmingham Post-Herald. From the Atlanta Business Chronicle. From NetGuide. From ZDNet.

Like any western hero I have my faults. I'm not always diplomatic. I'm not always careful. I can be an arrogant know-it-all. I talk more than I listen. Again, being right most of the time does not help my cause.

But it lets me look myself in the mirror and be proud of what I see.

Today, with my 56th birthday looming, I still see a young man in that mirror. I still see someone young enough to start a big adventure, learn a new beat, see a new town, cover a new boom.

That boom is renewable energy.

 There is already evidence the boom is real. There's a town in Italy that makes a profit with wind turbines. There are "hockey stick" projections for solar energy. Geothermal production will nearly double in the next five years.

Despite all this we seem to live at a time of scarcity. Our future visions are dystopic. Good people like Al Gore have convinced many we are living in the end times, that our children will see the seas boil and the world die.

That's something I want to fight. It's the assumption of scarcity that is driving the politics of our time. When people feel threatened, insecure, feudalism is their first instinct. In this case, a feudalism of the very rich, by the very rich, and for the very rich, because they control the resources whose scarcity is being boosted.

There have been times in my career when I have played the harbinger of doom, warning people that the party is about to end. I did this at the end of the 1970s and again at the end of the 1990s. No one wanted to hear it. I persisted in part because I knew I was right, and in part because I felt it necessary to balance irrational exuberance in hopes a lower temperature might keep the pot boiling a little longer.

Today there are lots of people who don't want to hear an optimistic message. Peng, for instance, a recent commenter at this blog, seems to think global warming is a crock, that coal is plentiful, and that there's some hidden agenda aimed at making people miserable by "going green" that must be fought.

He's about half-right. Global warming may be true, but it doesn't matter because that's a political frame we can't win in. The whole green thing is a crock. Telling people to limit themselves may make you feel self-righteous, but it leads in your neighbor to the desire for gluttony. In the end restraint is a call to fear, and fear leads to tyranny.

I prefer the idea of abundance. Abundance is coming. We can hasten its coming by saving, by being smart about energy use and energy pricing. The price of energy should include all its external costs, and it doesn't right now. We can change that.

The cost of harvesting the energy of the Sun, the wind and the Earth is falling. It will fall in the latter two cases due to mass production of turbines and related equipment, and as larger veins of Earth energy are tapped. It will fall in solar because technology is changing.

Each generation of solar cells turns out to be much better than what came before. There are breakthroughs happening in laboratories that will soon make their way into the field. The gadgets of the last decade are going to be come off the grid first, followed by the laptops of the 1990s, which are now the dominant PC technology.

At some point, even if we ignore the external costs of coal and oil, even if we continue to subsidize them as we do today, the cost of harvesting energy from the Sun, on a kilowatt basis, is going to cross the cost of producing it from burning stuff. At some point, putting up solar panels on your roof is going to become a good financial deal.

It's at that point that everything changes, but we'll start to see the shift well before that, when the pattern becomes obvious to the mainstream media. The prices of burning stuff will start to fall. The power of those who control stuff we can burn will begin to abate. The need to fight for access to burning stuff will start to go away. The dystopic visions of our time will be replaced.

That's the story I want to cover. Maybe, once the turning point is reached I'll have pissed everyone off and be told to move on. Meanwhile I'll be called a pollyanna. It beats playing cassandra.

I prefer to be called a reporter. My typewriter is my pen, which thanks to this medium is mightier than any sword. And the man looking back at me in the mirror these days is smiling.