The world was a wildly different place at the end of the 19th Century. Life was brutish and short, with plagues, poor medical care and difficult life limiting the average US life to a mere 48 years.
How ancient that world seems to us these days, plague outbreaks in the centre of the industrialized world, massive fatalities at sea during what were routine voyages and even on land, where the most popular mode of transportation was the horse carriage, travel was difficult and dangerous. Rail travel was changing the world, and coal powered engines were the mainstay of any an industrializing economy, making travel and transport shorter and more comfortable. Film renders to us these quaint images from times long gone of men shoving coal into furnaces, and many of us cannot relate, the most smoky fumes we ever see being those from cars with poor exhaust systems.
 | gone with the wind
| What am I getting at you may ask. Well, the point is that the world is in a constant state of flux and in the changing times mankind must strive to overcome every last adversity. 100 years from today, our worry about global warming may have been calmed by new technologies, even as human life may have to change radically to offset and counter the changes in our environment. Hurricanes like Katrina, destructive tsunami and other weather phenomena that are today outside our control may then be better forecasted and their ramifications better managed. Our children may look back in awe at this era of ‘environmental plagues' in wonder at how primitive the world of their parents was. A stretch too far? Perhaps, but just this minute there are human beings around the world working to bring about just such changes or carving opportunities from the inexorable warming up of the planet.
Picture how the troubles of that fin de siècle were taken head on by entrepreneurs and coin squeezed out of them. Penicillin and other antibiotics, pain killers, vaccines, cars, airplanes and many other inventions were invented and radically improved lives. More interesting than that however was how these inventions transformed society further than their specific intended goals. With the new products came new vocations, and the effects of these new career possibilities snowballed into opportunities of every shade. Such things as are taken for granted today as the mass market trade of cars are only possible because of the invention of the assembly line. And with such factories and 24 hour production, came new paradigms in management as factories became large and complicated organisms. Railroads led to careers as train drivers, and railway engineers, and train conductors. The advent of the airplane gave rise to the precision science of air traffic control, and the art practised by airhostesses. In our time also, we have seen the transformative power of the internet. Such media giants as Google, Yahoo!, Amazon and Ebay have spawned new industries and skills like Search Engine Optimization, internet trading, online payment systems, a booming trade in second-hand products that might otherwise have been turned into landfill; and so on.
As we seek to counter the effects of global warming, and as eco-friendly living is promoted, so are new products becoming viable. With ethanol becoming a more viable alternative to petroleum for fuelling engines, plants such as maize, hemp and wheat (straws) begin to take on much more economic promise than they previously did. Waste products of processing like bagasse from sugarcane or even animal waste for biogas will also rise in importance as peak oil, burgeoning middle classes in China and India and unrest in the Middle East push fossil energy prices skyward.
There are great opportunities here, and they are begging to be seized. In Kenya for example, Mumias Sugar has already awoken to this reality, and is positioning itself to benefit from the ramifications of Kyoto or the son of Kyoto. The onset of carbon trading schemes means that there is a direct economic value attached to green products, in addition of course to the over-arching moral one. There is such great opportunity here that we may soon see Coffee Cooperatives contemplating name changes as the potential income from maize straws broken down into fuel overtakes the income from coffee exports. Impossible? Think what people must have said of the idea of mass production of automobiles, or the telephone.
| new mexico- largest solar farm in the world
| Another resource, both green and yellow that begs to be exploited is the sun. Sitting astride the equator and often tortured by interminable droughts, Kenya can benefit from this one of the least understood technologies on earth. The viability of solar energy and the amount of research and innovation that will go into it will continue to rise as traditional fuel sources become scarce and expensive, and as society becomes less tolerant of eco-unfriendly fuels. Long resticted by the cheapness of coal and oil, and the power of the lobbies of the producers of coal, the power of the sun is set to be unleashed on the world. Thus enlightened, Kenya and Africa as a whole would do well to take on wholesale ready made solar technologies and turn for example the vast wastelands of Northern Kenya into dry Kindarumas, farming solar energy and charging the nation's development. A networked energy distribution system, transmitting energy much in the way that pipelines ferry petroleum today, may create a thriving market where energy hours from the sun earn crucial forex for African economies exporting energy to Europe through an exchange grid on Morocco's northern shores, for example.
Also of vital importance is wind energy. In Western Europe many countries are increasingly turning to the force of moving air to supplement their energy needs. Mbita in Suba District of Nyanza has been cited as one of the most promising locations for wind farming globally, with its winds promising high consistent voltages. Northern Kenya also offers similar opportunities. Think of the transformative potential for these areas, among the poorest in the whole nation, when they become the engine rooms for a newly energized Kenya. Japan and Korea have done it before, in the 1930s and 1950s. They imported ready Western technology, and through research and further improvement, stuffed their national furnaces with the fuel that pushed them to the global technological vanguard.
| here today, Mbita tomorrow
| We must however get down on it now. Research and development centres, boosted by governmental incentives and driven by private enterprise need to be set up urgently. Like with every business opportunity, how soon we get in is of vital importance. Even then, many of these projects can be initiated at community and jua-kali level. To gain mass popularity, the competence to create working alternative energy solutions like solar power and wind-power for domestic and small industrial use must be made as common place as say carpentry or metal work. It is not impossible, Korea walked this line, morphing from an agrarian cotton producing society, into textile manufacturing, and ultimately into specialized electronics.
Still ,in the end, the age of biofuels may be temporary, providing only a stop-gap solution to global energy needs. Also in the picture are hydrogen based solutions, and the utilization of waste for energy production. It is vital then that we are constantly vigilant, alert to the changing times and the opportunities that come with them. Rather than sit on the sidelines waiting to marvel at the technological progress of the world we live in, we must take part in the formation of the world to come, and perhaps make an economic gain in the process. Your grandchildren may want to know what you contributed.
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I looked in vain for signs in the budget that we were stock piling petrol to hedge against any price jumps in the short term. Overall though it is vital that we start to take our energy sources further and further away from fossil fuels. Someone once asked here why we could not do nuclear energy. That is clean, and .... ok, this is Kenya. Imagine Chernobyl X 12.
Now question, is solar energy really eco-friendly? How much energy does it take to make a solar farm? How long till it is returned?