Philip Greenspun (yeah, that one) recently wrote a post on the cost of converting the entire U.S. to electric cars that has kicked off a pretty interesting discussion. I ended up doing my own back-of-the-napkin calculations which pleasantly appear to corroborate with what Brad Templeton (yeah, that one) posted at the same time.

In chasing down the numbers (lots and lots of searching), and reading the comments (and looking at some other recent discussions, like the recent O’Reilly search/platform posts) I was reminded how lame the technology currently is in terms of online deliberation tools. Even simple things like representing citations, agreement, rebuttals, etc. aren’t supported at all. It’d be interesting to try to bring some of the research and projects being done on deliberative software to the web at large. (What’s interesting is that 5+ years since I was last really into this space, nothing usable has really come out/caught on… that in itself is worth further exploration.)

This conversation also got me to finally watch Who Killed The Electric Car? and really dig in to the history and the latest stuff going on with EVs and PHEVs. There’s a lot there, which I’ll eventually be posting (again, pointing to complete dearth of good knowledge collection/research tools). Wherefore art thou Gobbler? (That’s a rhetorical question. teachers.yahoo.com got shit-canned and nothing ever came out of the gobbler despite it’s obvious usefulness just about everywhere.)

What was sad about the documentary was that it highlighted a true failure of collective action. The “climax” of the doc films a scene that takes place in February/March 2005 (modern times! with Internet!) when GM sends the last of the EV1s sitting in a lot to destruction while protesters try to stop them. Despite having collected $1.9M to try to buy back the cars, keeping vigil for almost a month, and getting arrested for civil disobedience, GM “prevails” (apparently, even now there continues to be bizarre controversy over the few remaining EV1s). In the larger scheme of things, that particular battle was lost years ago, when the CARB regulations were overturned (this actually appears to be continuing battle), and GM’s “victory” was phyrric, at best (the ironies are many-fold, like GM selling their Ovonics battery stake to Chevron, which are now being used in Toyota Prius’ or that once again, oil prices are killing Detroit).

Well, it’s easy to get distracted by schadenfreude, but here we are, 30 years later, with no progress made, and the evidence now abundantly clear (and getting consistently worse) that our energy consumption habits are unsustainable and likely to bite us in the ass sooner, rather than later. From this perspective, GM and the whole auto industry were just a bunch of marks, no less bamboozled or inveigled than anyone else. After all, they’re simply working within their short-term economic self-interest. The ten-year outlook doesn’t even register in the 10Q, much less the “fate of the world” or the “consequences for your grand-children.” In economic terms, those would be externalities – not their problem, and not a cost they they would have to bear. This, I believe applies doubly so for the Oil Industry, which I’ve concluded are the true mustache twirling villians (well, probably the most apt comparison would be to the tobacco companies, although the Oil Industry dwarfs them, hence the caps). Quoting myself:

It seems to me, and I’m sort of surprised that others haven’t mentioned it, is that the real reason this is a thought experiment is because the the government and the drivers aren’t the sole (or even the primary) actors, but rather the oil and related industries. The combined market cap of the oil & gas industry is just shy of $1.9 Trillion – it’s larger than #2 (drug manufacturers) and #3 (central banking) combined. Exxon Mobile (XOM) alone, is $480B – larger than the combined market cap of all auto manufacturers ($381B). XOM currently has an EBITDA of $76.5B. It continues to post record profits as oil prices have gone up (currently 35.4% quarterly revenue and 17.3% quarterly profit growth). The profits they stand to reap over the next several decades (which is the timeframe – remember XOM started as Standard Oil back in 1870) is in the trillions.

Now what might be a most interesting continuation of this thought experiment is that, in light of this sort of economic landscape and these economic motivations, what would a transition plan to a saner automotive and energy system look like? How would you make the dominoes fall and what would be involved? Hmm…

I’ve been giving it some thought, and it’s a tough problem. It seems that there’s a number of strings that could/should be tugged to sort of unravel things. What worries me is that while reasonably, it would seem that we should all be taking this quite seriously (after all, no matter how rich you are, global environmental problems would end up affecting you and your progeny), it’s quite plausible that as individuals, a society, a species, we just don’t have the mental faculties or social organization to rationally/cohesively react to global/species-affecting crises.

That’s one way of saying that the technology of social augmentation and collective action may have a key role to play in trying to catch us up so that we can be smart enough fixing our problems as we have been dumb in causing them.

(For those looking for Don Quixote references, sorry, I was just using the phrase as a way to sum up the gist of the second part of this post. I’ll change the title if I can think of something more apt or descriptive.)