If ever there were a time for entrepreneurs to be working harder on making everything more efficient and using fewer natural resources, it's now. Congress has boosted technology companies through a variety of actions that include subsidies, favorable regulatory treatment and tax breaks. We don't do anything remotely comparable for alternative energy efforts or conservation. The good news is that technology itself is making things more efficient. Adding intelligence to everything we touch, and everything we do, means we can use fewer irreplaceable resources in the manufacture and operation of all kinds of products.
Technology can serve a sustainable planet.
Whether it can do that in the absence of our leaders' grasp of what's at stake, or the will to do anything about it, is doubtful. Maybe the marketplace and governments won't react in time, even if they care enough to try. No sane person wants Draconian governmental controls or a world where wretched poverty amid islands of sheltered, high-consumption wealth remains the permanent state of affairs. If we don't want that, then something fundamental has to change in the way we're doing business. Sooner or later humanity will have to rally around sustainability, a notion that is foreign to almost every economic and political system.