Energy Technology-The New Frontier?

I recently went to hear Tom Friedman give what turned out to be his standard speech extolling the virtues of Yankee ingenuity and the massive potential available to the U.S. if we as a nation are just willing to engage in the energy revolution.

It was extremely interesting to see how the audience-if my and friend's "young adult" children are a fair sampling-was split much less on political grounds but rather on a generational divide.

A Nantucket audience tends to be Republican except for when a speaker-this is part of the Geschke Lecture Series-happens to be a Democrat. Still, Mr Friedman has enough of a draw to get some crossovers and his pitch was less political than economical, and was trying to (re)-awaken the beast of American economic global leadership.

His theme was based on his new book which can be quickly summarised that the world is: hot-global warming is happening and it is influenced by man; flat by which he means global; and it is crowded-especially in the third world.

The "youth" with whom I discussed the lecture were universally annoyed with him. Their main complaint was that they have been told of the damage we have done and are still doing to the planet since they were born-if not by their parents then by their teachers, and frankly they were tired of hearing how bad it was going to be. They were more interested to hear if anyone had any solutions other than that they are essentially screwed.

The adults were much more positive given that he spoke about the challenges that we as a nation face and rather simplistically stated that all we have to do is embrace the fact that there is an energy revolution taking place, we need to lead it, and everything will be all right.

Personally I have some reservations. All of his examples were of how American technology gets manufactured in China. First of all I am unhappy to see those jobs be outsourced to China and secondly, I believe the idea that only the Americans can innovate is rapidly becoming outdated and is even dangerous.

I appreciate that he was trying to engage his audience and that he thinks the revolution coming is in the world of energy, not politics, and therefore is a question of economic revival leading to "saving the planet". He also seemed to think that the change would entail some very short term pain and then everything would be good.

I don't think it is that simple.