We have to speed up energy innovation to the pace demonstrated in the growth of the Internet if we are to prevent irreversible climate disruptions that will irreparably harm the planet for our children's generation and all those that follow. The scale and speed of change required to ward off disaster cannot be achieved using conventional models. We need to constantly compress seven years of innovation into one - the pace described as innovating on "Internet time".
This requires government policy action now to drive the adoption of open source methods, and open standards that are essential for us to move quickly enough to ward off this crisis. These open models have proved themselves in creating the Internet and enabling the extraordinary pace of business and societal innovation around it.
This paper summarizes the results of sharing this point of view with 30 of the world's open source leaders at the NAPA Open Source Think Tank, which took place in 2009. It gathers the insights these leaders have learned through the transformation of the software industry by open source and open standards.
The Obama Administration Provides a Historical Opportunity to Create Successful Policy
The new U.S. Administration has demonstrated an immediate commitment to investing in green energy technologies and developing the new regulatory frameworks required to address the crisis of climate change. We have a unique historical opportunity to incorporate these open elements into the policy framework, but we must seize this opportunity now if we are to achieve the pace of innovation and adoption required to avert the climate change crisis. Government spending commitments and economic incentives of well over $100 billion for green technologies provide the necessary commercial leverage to drive an open innovation model, much as the U.S. Department of Defense's spending on computer equipment in the 70s enabled it to drive the adoption of the Internet Protocol that led to the modern Internet. This leverage needs to be exercised now while contracts and governance for these large taxpayer investments are still being put in place and while policy frameworks for regulation and market mechanisms are being detailed.
Combating Climate Change Requires Dramatically More Rapid Innovation and Change
Despite the fact that we are going through the worst recession in generations, we must focus on the scale and pace of climate change and recognize that the slow pace of conventional innovation and adoption will lead to disastrous climate disruptions.
Scientists have shown that our current path leads towards a doubling of carbon dioxide levels by 2050 and consequent massive climate disruptions from floods, droughts, hurricanes, rising sea levels and the elimination of critical ecosystems. It is widely recognized that to avoid this outcome we need to cut our carbon dioxide emissions by 80% from current levels through conservation and clean energy. This is despite projections that during this period global energy demand will grow from 131 to 26 trillion watts. Generating just half this power - 13 trillion watts - with zero carbon footprint energy sources is equivalent to 13,000 new 1 GW green power plants - the construction of roughly one major plant every other day.
Contrast this with the history of the pace of energy innovation and adoption: according to Shell's corporate planners, it has typically taken even a commercially proven primary new source of energy 25 years to get to a 1% share of the global market2.
The Growth of the Internet Shows Rapid Change is Feasible
Now, if this seems an impossible task let's remind ourselves of the Internet phenomenon and its transformational impact on our world. The Internet was built on open standards and open source software that started with the U.S. government's open communications standards (Internet Protocol or IP) in the 70s, which were used by a decentralized global community of software developers who created and used open source software and open standards to create a global network that touched every corner of humanity. The "web" first became visible as a tool to enable communication among a worldwide community of theoretical physicists at CERN in 1995, and from that point forward, Internet browsers evolved rapidly. In the decade after 1997, the percentage of the developed world using the Internet grew from 11% to 62%, fundamentally changing the structures of business in the process, perhaps most obviously in shopping, entertainment and communications. Instant access to information had an explosive impact on politics, and work became increasingly global as knowledge workers in Bangalore competed and collaborated with counterparts across the world.
A quick roll call of the leading software used on the web shows that it is dominated by open source software components such as the Linux operating system, the Apache web server, Perl, Python and other scripting languages. Open source's success has also been founded on a set of open standards that have built from basic routing and communications (IP, DNS) all the way up to user interface and e-commerce standards. Low barriers to global entry have enabled Darwinian competition among new businesses; industry leaders like Google and Amazon are often the ones who adopted open source and open standards to innovate most rapidly and to gain widespread adoption most quickly. The early winners built the foundations for the next layer of software and business innovation. Thus did open source and open standards spawn the broadest and fastest innovation in the history of mankind.
The bottom line? In a little more than a decade business transacted over the Internet has grown to $6.8 trillion or 15% of global GDP. This is the scale of transformation that is required to combat climate change.
