This is a term that I’ve been pretty excited about for maybe nine months. At our meeting yesterday, Bill Moomaw gave me a book titled “Scaling Alternative Energy: The Role of Emerging Markets”, which I started to read on the way home. This idea is very exciting to me. Moomaw talked about the advantages of developing alternative energies in developing countries, because there is a scale factor, which I wished I had pushed him to talk more about so that I understand it better. Ben said that the interview went really well, and he’ll be able to tease out exactly what needs to be teased out. His confidence is reassuring to me.

From what I remember about scale from my environmental economics class, it is one of the factors to pay attention to as markets change to become more environmentally-friendly. From what I understand of what Professor Moomaw said yesterday to me, China and India are good places to develop these technologies, because a decision can be made centrally, and this has very wide effects because people are used to following these central decisions. also there are just a lot of people. This is why Courtney told me China was a major competitor when she worked at Second Wind.

It will be important to explain the scale factor in order to establish the importance of China in the clean energy movement. This is going above and beyond our story of: Hold on a second America! China is not so bad, think for a second about why you think it’s so bad. Also, this is the beginning of an argument that I am making all the time. Just because there is consensus about China issues in the U.S. news, doesn’t mean it’s got to be correct. There could be some inherent, deep-seeded bias that’s shared in the media–Ruibao Ren at Brandeis agrees with me. could be. Because news is consistent in the American system, does not mean it’s correct, and does not mean this news hold in all systems. Maybe there could be different news in a different system that conflicts with American news, but holds water equally well in its own system. This makes me think of Jim Fallows.

Bill Moomaw told us about how China is outpacing the West in a couple of really quantifiable ways, and the development of clean energies is one important way. This is going to be more and more important, as energy issues heat up (This is a clever comment.).