CALDEIRÃO DE BOLSA

Atomez Escreveu:Qualquer tecnologia só se torna socialmente útil quando é economicamente viável.

Europe spends €470 million to boost fuel cells and hydrogen-powered cars

The Associated Press
Friday, May 30, 2008
BRUSSELS, Belgium: European governments agreed Friday to spend €470 million (US$731 million) developing fuel cells and hydrogen technology for cars that could slash oil consumption and carbon dioxide emissions within decades.

Car and energy companies such as Daimler AG and Royal Dutch Shell PLC are expected to match or exceed the EU funding for the six-year research project that should speed up research and make cleaner cars a commercial reality between 2010 and 2020.

The European Commission says hydrogen cars could cut the amount of oil used by road transport by 40 percent by 2040 and halve carbon emissions by 2050.

"The break-even point could be most likely reached between 2025 and 2035," it said. "European industry needs additional stimulation to invest in the technology."

The cost of oil rose as high as US$135 last week, almost doubling from a year ago and pushing up prices across the economy as transport costs soar.

Worried about high energy prices, tight supply and oil's contribution to global warming, companies and governments have invested billions of euros (dollars) in alternative fuels such as biofuels made from energy crops. Regulators are also pushing for more energy-efficient vehicles.

Hydrogen-powered fuel cells already are in limited use in place of fossil fuels, but they are so far neither efficient nor inexpensive enough for widespread use.

Why tough times can be good for innovation
By G. Pascal Zachary

Wednesday, May 28, 2008
Corn prices are at record highs. Costs for other agricultural essentials, from wheat to coffee to rice, have soared as well. And many people are stunned, even frightened, by all the increases.

But some entrepreneurs and analysts - recognizing that relative price increases in specific goods always encourage innovators to find ways around the problem - say they see an opportunity for creative solutions.

"When something becomes dear, you invent around it as much as you can," said David Warsh, editor of Economicprincipals.com, a newsletter on trends in economic thinking.

Joel Mokyr, an economic historian at Northwestern University, added, "All of a sudden, some things that didn't look profitable now do."

Smart people won't shift their efforts to agricultural problems, however, if they think that price increases are only temporary, said Henry Kressel, a managing director at the private equity firm Warburg Pincus and a pioneer in laser research. "When you have a sudden blip in prices," Kressel said, "it doesn't give rise to entrepreneurial activity."

Consider the periodic surges in prices for computer memory hardware. Because its price is declining over the long run - a result of new technologies and automation - innovators tend to stay away from the field, leaving it to a few large, established companies.

For decades, declining prices for food had the same chilling effect. In the United States and Europe - the world's two biggest consumers of new technologies - food was plentiful and relatively inexpensive. Innovators turned their attention elsewhere.

With higher food prices possibly here to stay, clever people can now try things that simply weren't cost-effective before.

"I don't pay attention to inflation, but I do pay attention to big problems," said Bill Gross, chairman of Idealab, the business incubator based in Pasadena, California. "If you can beat the price of the big gorilla in the marketplace, there's big opportunity."

One clear "big opportunity" lies in changing the relationship between food and energy. Fertilizer lets farmers raise production but is energy-intensive to make. Transporting food great distances also requires large amounts of energy. So does processing. Finally, some foods are now being valued in relation to oil because of their potential use as fuel.

For some years now, innovators have trained their attention on alternative energy; they are now likely to concentrate on food production as well.

For Americans, that would be going back to the future. Seventy years ago, farming was the technological frontier.

In the 1930s, after the Depression wiped out so many small farmers, the U.S. government introduced "price supports," which lifted the return to farmers on basic crops. Higher prices got the attention of innovators in farm equipment, seeds and other so-called inputs.

Sally Clarke, a historian at the University of Texas, has found in a study that higher prices enabled Midwest farmers, then reliant chiefly on animal-drawn plows, to justify investment in tractors, raising efficiency. A study in the 1950s by the economist Zvi Griliches of American farmers' adoption of more productive varieties of corn showed how higher prices reduced the cost of adopting new technologies.

For the new agricultural innovators, these are early days. It will take time for the pipeline to fill with ambitious projects. Monsanto and BASF are among the relatively few big companies that remain active in agricultural innovation. And the most creative researchers cannot immediately drop their other projects in response to price signals.

But given time, priorities change. Tomorrow's most intense technological battles will involve a range of agricultural topics, including these:

Using water and fertilizer more efficiently, so farmers can grow more with less.

Finding new ways to suppress weeds, whose growing resistance to traditional herbicides is raising the cost of farming.

Designing better seeds, either through conventional means or genetic modification.

Finding ways to meet the needs of the eat-local movement, promoted by the food writer Michael Pollan, among others, which requires innovative "small batch" processing techniques as well as a shift in values.

"We need to pull out all the stops and do everything we can to improve farm productivity," said William Dyer, a plant biologist at Montana State University.

Engineering a new "green revolution" that will yield, say, more affordable wheat and rice - all while meeting the concerns of various special-interest groups - will be much harder than designing a better music player. After all, you can't eat an iPod.

And in agriculture, safety requirements can trump the need for productivity gains. A new herbicide can cost $100 million to develop - less than the amount needed for a new drug, but more than for a new cellphone. Government regulations, however, only raise the cost of innovation, not halt it.

Ultimately, higher food prices give innovators room to cover the cost of protecting human health. But prices are a democratic signal: When all innovators see them, their ability to sneak up on an opportunity, while others nap, vanishes.

"The bigger the prize people are chasing, the more people go after it," said Paul Romer, a theorist on sources of economic growth. "As people pile into an area, the expected return to any one innovator goes down."

Yet, fortunately, the return to society goes up.

G. Pascal Zachary teaches journalism at Stanford University and writes about technology and economic development.