“The internet, the worldwide web, the fiberoptic communications systems and satellite, and other communications systems we have are, I think, a key to the nervous system of the planet. And when it comes to the question of whether we are going to be able to actually save this planet from tripping into that runaway catastrophic climate change, the first place we have to look is to get our nervous system working to help us to do it. That actually, there are ways if we use this intelligent nervous system right, we can actually reduce our abuses of resources in other areas and may help us avert those catastrophic tipping points that are now looming very large. And that’s my big idea in terms of the internet and what it’s there for and what we can use it for and what it is doing.
Um, some examples, I suppose, just from my own experience over the last two years that encourage me in that way; I remember meeting, in relation to the concept of cloud computing, meeting an engineer two years ago and saying to me of course he showed me a laptop and said, “you know in three or four years’ time, we’ll be using one fifth of the energy to run that laptop because we’ll be taking away the disk drive and all the hard energy consuming stuff on the computer and it’ll be cloud computing based.” And I heard that and said that’s, that’s a good chunk of energy savings. Ok, we still have to run the data management systems or the data centre systems, but we can do that, I think in my role as Energy Minister, in a fairly clean way. So, again, we start to hope what a quantum reduction, an 80% reduction, in my own emissions in my use of a laptop, and I said “well that’s the sort of change we need.”
I remember being in Japan, and I have since seen companies here in Dublin, which were talking about what’s the next generation of the transmission of the fiberoptics system and switching equipments, and the concept was that with in five years we could be 100 times as efficient. And again that said to me, ‘there’s a productivity increase. There’s an ability for us to actually make these emissions reductions and instead of the same standards of service that we meet.’
Or indeed, a company like IBM here in Dublin, just to pick one example of a lot of research that’s going on here and elsewhere, are looking at the next generation of computing systems here that are one thousand times more powerful than the current generation. And that’s why I think there’s an opportunity for us in this new nervous system of the planet to actually have a quantum leap in efficiency that helps us achieve the fundamental objective in this disruptive world, which is to actually consume less. We have to dematerialize our development. We have to do what Herman Daley said is not to start chasing quantum of growth but start chasing quality of improvement. And the internet will help us do it.
And it’s not just (??) for that, but that’s one of its great opportunities. And one of the real opportunities that it presents us is to start managing our use of energy, managing our use of resources in a far more sophisticated manner, to actually use the efficiency productivity gains that we can get from the internet and the communications development around it to get a massive reduction in consumption of power and material resources. That’s my thought as to why I’m focusing on developing here, as Minister for Communications, the environment we need to make it happen. I would have to hold up my hand and say for those who are from Dublin, while not from Ireland but from outside, we have failed in that regard in the last ten years, in particular.
We’ve had a short term private equity model in some of our telecommunications companies, as we had in a lot of various economy that failed us. It didn’t think long term. It didn’t think big. It didn’t think about investing itself in some of the (state) networks we need. I hope things are changing, (and this moment) will be a change. That we may actually (get in) some of our telecommunications some ownership that sees the characteristic of this network has to be more open to work better. And that actually could be a better economic opportunity for those providing the systems. The old telecommunications model of closed networks where you own all the transaction relationships with the customer is gone. We need a different model, and I think we can deliver it in this very difficult economic times in this country. We need to start with the schools. We need to make sure every classroom has the ability for its own students to get under the hood of this technology and start tinkering with it so that they actually go out in the world able to renovate, able to change, able to use less by using the internet more. That’s our task.
I look forward to listening to some of the speakers today and I would like to commend Patty Cosworth for organizing it, and I wish everyone the best of luck today. Thank you.