Preview of Tom Friedman's thinking for his new book - Hot, Flat and Crowded. Killer quote (emphasis added):
FP: And what about drilling? Republican presidential candidate Sen. John McCain, his running mate Gov. Sarah Palin, and President George W. Bush are implying that lifting environmental restrictions on drilling is the way to promote energy independence.
TF: Well, I think it’s patent nonsense. No one believes that somehow offshore, there’s enough oil in any near term and even the long term to provide us oil independence. It’s the wrong approach because in a world that’s hot, flat, and crowded, fossil fuels—and particularly crude oil—are going to be expensive and exhausting. Therefore the focus should be on the next great global industry: clean energy technology. When I hear McCain pounding the table for “drill, drill, drill,” it reminds me of someone pounding the table for IBM Selectric typewriters on the eve of the IT revolution.
I’m not against offshore drilling, by the way, because I believe the technology and the safety has improved far beyond where it was back in the 70s, 80s, and 90s, even. What I’m against is making it the centerpiece of our energy policy. If all McCain said was, “Let’s drill, but let’s also throw everything into innovating the next generation of clean-energy technologies,” I’d say, “You’ve got it exactly right, pal.”
Its funny because as someone who has done a half dozen legacy migration projects (with mental and emotional scars to prove it), I was thinking the same thing. The entrenched mindset. "If we just dig our trench deeper (in this case literally) then we will be ok."...at least until the person in question retires...
One of the legacy migration project I worked on, I was the third consultant that tried to get this company off of mainframe and onto distributed systems (which are no panacea but this company really did need to make the move). The core developers of the mainframe were actively hostile to change, as opposed to simply passive aggressive, which we expect. For example, if you asked about how a piece of functionality worked, say a report writer, the developer would not answer, stand up, walk out of the room, come back with a 800 page "data model", slam it on the table and walk out of the room. Good times.
A chief objection beyond fear of the unknown was the perceived lack of elegance in the distributed systems as opposed to the control from say JCL. Anyway, what progress I made was due to analogizing that we were leaving Greece which has a rich culture, history, philosophy and moving to Rome which maybe was not as elegant as Greece but still people like circuses, roads and acqueducts. So when, several times a day, a perceived go/ no go issue arose, I would gently remind the developers that "we are now in Rome and things work differently here."
Intransigently digging the trench deeper is not the way, instead we need to better understanding the energy problem in a larger context, and finding deployable technologies to help address it. If you think drill, drill, drill is the answer, then I think the answer for you is the same as someone who knows COBOL and flat refuses to learn modern languages even when that is required - a nice retirement house on a golf course somewhere.
