Thoughts on technological approaches to sustainability
In a previous post I've laid out some initial thoughts on wealth and taxation, and how they might be used to drive more sustainable behavior.
Here I'll start organizing some thoughts on whether technological means can be used to drive sustainable practices.
It seems that an obvious sustainable movement is the replacement of the movement of physical objects by information: videoconference instead of travel, music download instead of shipping CDs, etc. Given the disproportionate impact of air transport on CO2 emissions, it would seem that anything that cuts down on air transport would have a dramatic impact.
There is a lot of potential for reducing waste in the deployment of advanced inventory management systems and just-in-time-production. If extra inventory is never produced, then the emissions and waste associated with those industrial processes never occur as well.
These are measures for which powerful economic incentives already exist, and in theory, they should take hold quickly with little intervention.