Ordinarily I’m a skeptic when it comes to futurism, crystal ball gazing or prescient punditry. However Problogger, a blog on blogging, issued an interesting challenge to fellow bloggers to write a Review or Preview post on our own particular subject matter. I thought about it and decided to jump into the swirling center of the Time Tunnel and then report back what I saw.

So I just returned from December 20, 2007. Here’s the headlines:

• President Bush has decided against all advice to again increase troop levels in Iraq. This time he is calling back all veterans of any age to fill the ranks depleted by the war.
• Al Gore has developed an entire stand-up routine made up of his answers to whether he is going to run for President based on his huge popularity. He regrets that it took the destruction of Miami’s beach front communities by Hurricane Inofhe to put him squarely in the spotlight.
• The country is still reeling over the news that VP Dick Cheney’s death was kept secret by the White House for 3 months until his daughter finally got someone to anonymously spill the beans.
• In Europe, public panic over the rapidly falling temperatures due to the rerouting of the Gulf Stream is only somewhat offset by the reemergence of the Alpine ski business.
• I had to mow the damn lawn twice before I headed back in time. In late December!Bummer.
• Techcrunch just posted its 200th post thanking their advertisers
• The blogosphere is reeling over the bursting of the mommyblog bubble
• Google just completed acquisition of Fartzi, the three month old social networking site for adolescent boys. The $2.2 billion in stock they spent is considered a smart purchase given the 100 million daily pageviews. They’ll figure out that revenue thing later
• It was decided by everyone in the Valley to skip web 3.0 and go directly version 4.1 (beta)
• SEO has become so refined that the top ten natural search results for any given search keyword are totally incomprehensible due to algorithmic optimization
• Apple has released the quad core iMac shufflephone, a miniature device that does everything and can survive a drop from a ten story window. I’m very happy to report that the stock is hovering around $299 per share.
• A Turkish engineer unveiled his home built super-efficient gas powered car that gets 400 MPG with no emissions. Mysteriously, something fell from space and demolished his workshop, killing him in the process. Onlookers described the object as a long steel rod traveling extremely fast and totally silent.

I could go on and on as it truly has been an amazing year. Who knew Barack and Hillary were an item? That Bill would become the head of the UN? That the Bills would have a 12-0 season? Can’t wait to live through it all…

VC Mike has the transcript of a brief talk VC Bob Metcalfe did on cleantech or as he dubs it, ‘Enertech’. The talk was five minutes long so the transcript is annotated with additional notes on each statement.

Here’s a snippet on how we can change things (annotations in Bold):

‘First, as it evolves to enhance its email, search, blogs, social networking, audio, and video capabilities, the Internet can increasingly be used to reduce energy consumption by massively substituting COMMUNICATION for TRANSPORTATION. Just think of all the automobile and airplane miles and attendant carbon emissions that will be saved by transmitting our BITS to meetings instead of lugging our ATOMS. Let’s try hard to attend these Massachusetts Enertech Cluster meetings in the future without actually going anywhere. Down with pressing the flesh!

Second, starting with today’s base of a billion users and Google, the Internet is becoming an unprecedented medium for COLLECTIVE INTELLIGENCE. More and more people are getting better and better information and communication tools that will be applied to the development of cheap and clean energy and to solve Global Warming. The Internet is helping accelerate intellectual progress exponentially, and as Ray Kurzweil ‘70 writes, the singularity is near.

And third, the people, processes, and institutions that built the Internet will themselves help bring the world cheap and clean energy. I’m talking here about the Internet’s teams of scientists, engineers, entrepreneurs, and venture capitalists. And I’m talking about actual Internet techies and FOCACA. Of course, like the Internet, solving the world’s energy problems will take about 30 years. By meeting here today, I hope we are aiming to help techies deliver cheap and clean energy faster than we delivered the Internet.’

Thanks to Paul Kedrosky.

Look at this building going up in Miami: better than a movie set. I wonder what will happen when its foundations are under water and it deals with howling storms 50% of the year?

The Joni Mitchell lyric in the title of this post has long been a favorite singalong for environmentalists and with good reason. In our urban/suburban sprawls, parking lots are the ultimate example of our disregard for the land, representing formerly open countryside now coated in asphalt and covered with cars. But there may be some redemption for this stark image of man blithely overrunning nature.

Google and other companies are building solar ‘trees’ (ironic choice of descriptive nomenclature) that provide shade to parked cars while serving as inexpensive, ideally situated platforms for solar power generation. Because these platforms can be optimized for solar collection they are often far more useful than rooftops. The open spaces already exist as parking lots and you can’t really complain that they are esthetically less pleasing than an expanse of concrete covered with vehicles.

A good example of short term improvements in the way we use commercial land. It might be interesting to calculate how much fuel might be saved by lessening the blast of AC required to cool off a car that has been sitting in the California sun all day!