New Mark Mills Report Discusses Energy and the Cloud
Any confidence in “smart bureaucratic governance” is mostly misplaced
First, the author of great new book, “The Cloud Revolution,” Mark Mills has a new review of a book, “Restarting the Future: How to Fix the Intangible Economy” by Jonathan Haskel and Stian Westlake, in the Wall Street Journal.
I prefer Mills look at future, whereby he argues that confidence in “smart bureaucratic governance” is mostly misplaced. (see * link below)
Also, Mr. Mills has a new report coming out next week, which is guaranteed to stir the climate change pot.
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Mr. Mills then explains why the global appetite for energy is not heading south:
“One can begin with a reality that cannot be blinked away: energy is needed for everything that is fabricated, grown, operated, or moved... digital devices and hardware—the most complex products ever produced at scale—require, on average, about 1,000 times more energy to fabricate, pound for pound, than the products that dominated the 20th century... it takes nearly as much energy to make one smartphone as it does one refrigerator, even though the latter weighs 1,000 times more. The world produces nearly 10 times more smartphones a year than refrigerators. Thus, the global fabrication of smartphones now uses 15% as much energy as does the entire automotive industry, even though a car weighs 10,000 times more than a smartphone. The global Cloud, society’s newest and biggest
infrastructure, uses twice as much electricity as the entire nation of Japan.
And then, of course, there are all the other common, vital needs for energy, from heating and cooling homes to producing food and delivering freight.
Advocates of a carbon-free world underestimate not only how much energy the world already uses, but how much more energy the world will yet demand... In America, there are nearly as many vehicles as people, while in most of the world, fewer than 1 in 20 people have a car. More than 80% of the world population has yet to take a single flight.”
https://www-wsj-com.cdn.ampproject.org/c/s/www.wsj.com/amp/articles/why-the-energy-transition-will-fail-11661547051
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*Mark P. Mills reviews “Restarting the Future” by Jonathan Haskel and Stian Westlake https://www.wsj.com/articles/restarting-the-future-review-you-cant-touch-this-11658873634