CITY JOURNAL When it comes to technology and money, all roads lead to Silicon Valley. But when it comes to support for world-changing science, today’s tech leaders think small. The world awaits the first Nobel Prize for a Google, Apple, or Amazon scientist, or for a researcher funded by any Silicon Valley company.
It was perhaps no coincidence that Pope Francis singled out air conditioning as an example of “harmful” consumption in his June 18 Environmental Encyclical, mere days before the Northern Hemisphere was fully into summer.
It is impossible to talk today about energy issues without beginning with an acknowledgement of the Pope’s Environmental Encyclical that was officially released today, and leaked globally earlier this week.
USA Today New science is the closest thing to magic needed to solve seemingly intractable problems in every domain from medicine and manufacturing to energy and the environment.
This Friday OPEC meets in Vienna. The elephant in the room is the very visible impact of America’s shale fields on world oil markets. The technologies that have unleashed U.S. shale hydrocarbons have resulted in the fastest growth in oil production in a century.
The spectacular emergence of an industry that drills in shale formations to produce hydrocarbons is generating massive quantities of untapped data. The $600 billion in U.S. shale infrastructure investments and the nearly 2,000 million well-feet drilled has produced hundreds of petabytes of relevant data.
