Liberty's Blog

The Al Gore Show.

The EE Times is a deadtree/online engineering trade magazine. They have an article , actually they have a few, which are linked to from the main artIcle. about Al Gore's speech at the Embedded Systems Conference in San Jose California. The audience in this group would be a sophisticated engineering group in both software and hardware disiplines.

Embeded systems are the small built in computers that run our cars, microwaves or cell phones. Sometimes the embedded devices are real simple like the timer in a microwave, some like those in some cell phones are software and hardware wonder.

Linux Devices has fragments of his one hour speech. What bothers me is that in The EE Times articles and else where I've found references to Al Gores speech there are no challenges to Al Gores premises and all his claims are presumed as facts.

Gore envisions what he calls an "electronet, or 'smart' grid, that will serve two functions: Instead of depending on large, 1000-megawatt coal-firing power centers sending power to incredibly inefficient appliances in our homes and businesses, let's have a grid made up of many more micro-power centers that make it possible for small producers to feed into the central power source. Then, take off any (power supply) cap for businesses and individuals who sell into the grid."

"We might not need to build another huge mega-power system if this grid idea can be designed and built," Gore said. "If you can build embedded systems that feed into this micro-generator grid, we can empower individuals to quickly identify where the wasteful streams of energy are going, and do something about them."

Gore said that he believes that the increasing amount of CO2 in the Earth's atmosphere, caused by so-called "greenhouse gases" from automobiles, heavy industry, and electronic equipment is the central reason why the ozone layer in the atmosphere is breaking up.

"The climate crisis is the most dangerous and important symptom of the deeper underlying collision between our civilization as we now see it and the ecological system of the planet," Gore said. "We are going to need all the scientific help we can muster to turn this dangerous trend around."

Not only are the poles melting, but microbes that proliferate in the tropics are moving to the higher and lower latitudes, away from the equator, Gore warned.

The buy in that global warming is a real phenomenon, that it is caused by man, and that we can mitigate the events in the future is disturbing. Maybe the event being in California has something to do with it.

Yet there is a big future in greenness of these systems. Making some of them longer lasting or even repairable is a very green thing to do. While the idea of making more Energy efficient appliances with embedded computers might be a great marketing idea, its not going to save the world from global warming. Doesn't mater how efficient your cell phone is.


embedded systems Al-Gore-ithms

posted by Liberty @ 3:58 PM